yearning for the night bus

You all know how big a rabbit is.  Jack Rabbits and hares are much bigger. they’re the size of large cats or small dogs or just-walking-age children.

They also like to hang out in gangs of a hlf dozen to over 30.

and in the middle of backcountry dirt roads.

perhaps they’re dustbathing

or blood sacrifce

I don’t know because when you come up the road at night because your dog has a tiny bladder and needs to go out at midnight and you have no yard so you’re walking him on the dirt road around your neighborhod because you might aw well get some stargazing in, and you come just over the ridge to see a coven of twenty jackrabbits in the middle of the road

and

they

all

stand

up

not just onto all fours like a proper prey animal

No they get up on thier hind legs and don’t just sit but STAND like tiny rabbit-skinned toddlers, wobbing slightly as they stare directly at you eyes shining in your flashlight’s glow

…Blood Red.

And a chill goes through you on that warm july night because while they’re a puntable size and allegedly herbivores they’re standing and watching you just like people and you are vastly outnumbered.

everyone freezes

you’re considering your odds aganst roughly 200lbs of Suspiciously Humanoid Hare

and they’re considering their odds against you

the only sound in the never-ending high desert wind 

somewhere in your peripheral vision you can see the streetlights but they seem awfully far away

The nearest Jack Rabbit

Blinks

and takes a single shuffling step

forward

You area an overdevloped monkey and your prefrontal cortex is capable of some amazing feats but it runs very slowly compared to the reflexes of a rabbit and you’re frozen as you desperately scramble for the appropriate course of action, hands feeling thick and useless, mouth dry and feet imeasurably heavy there’s no way you’d outrun THESE, god there’s a rabies outbreak going around that shit’s not curable-

The Dog

L U N G E S

It’s only the briefest of movements but the animal you’d picked out for his gangly legs and floppy ears and goofy smile is suddenly a dark shape of muscle and teeth and had flung himself at the horrible goblin rabbits faster than mere physics should dictate, appearing in the circle of the flashlight for only the briefest of moments before the jolt from the leash makes you stumble and the light falters

The Jack Rabbits

Scatter

Vanishing into the faintly starlit sagebrush in as so many faint gray shapes that might be mistaken for the dustclouds they kick up

Later, you sit on the couch disquieted

and you wonder

If the sight of the Jack Rabbits standing and studying you was frightening enough to make you yearn for the safety of the yellowed streetlights

what must it be like from thier end?

what terrifying creature 

deliberately ties itself

to something so horrible

CONGRATULATE, THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I WAS GOING FOR.

Tumblr has joined the war against advertising on the side against advertising.

Which is.

Tumblr is a Saas — software as a service, this term is important to link what is going on. Twelve seconds of research will show you how cheap it is to add a user to a Saas. It isn’t $0.00 but it’s a fraction of a cent. The big cost is the initial load.

It’s $7 a month to pay for Tumblr Premium.

That’s fucking insane.

It should be $1-2.

You will obviously need a significantly higher volume to make the same amount of cash. I have an idea. Stop introducing shit people don’t want.

I am here on this site because of the perverts and artists and people with interestingly unhinged takes on media and/or life events.

There is no feature I crave on Tumblr beyond maintenance and a “reply via email” because I hate having inboxes outside of my email.

This is a business. I get it. I do not want this site to go under. I want the crew that runs it to be compensated well.

And.

There is no content Tumblr as a business is producing that I give a shit about. I am here still because it is the most convenient meeting ground to be weird and to enjoy weird and discover weird.

Premium experiences are so goddamn overrated and over bloated.

You have lost the plot and gotten way too big for your britches.

Charge fairly, provide the core service intended, and get out of the way for the mechanism that makes your product worth it — in this case, the evolving nonsense essays, comments, hilariously specific and targeted hate mail that feels at least half loving, and comics.

This place is wires and a collection of bad decisions in a group project for a teacher that is themselves about to get fired. It’s special because of the people. Not the fucking software.

Look into my beautiful eyes, tumblr staff.

Ban the nazis.

Stop banning trans people for being trans.

Keep the lights on and the floors swept.

Understand that every feature to compete with another network misses the point that this is place is a dive bar.

You bought a dive bar. You can’t make it into a gastropub. Your attempts to bring in headlining entertainment is going to fall on deaf ears, we are here to see the local folks live their theater kid nightmare orgasm comedy fest.

This brought to you by counting how many ads I had to scroll past on my phone while stuck in traffic where the ad purposefully slowed down the scrolling mechanism.

You are not going to annoy me into supporting this business.

CURRENT PRICE FOR TUMBLR PREMIUM: $7.00

ESTIMATED NET RETURN (($7 x 0.971) - $0.30): about $6.50

This accounts for basic credit card processing fees of 2.9% + $0.30. Something at Tumblr's size should be able to negotiate better, but we are being malicious in our calculations, and saying "you get the basic rate" to prove a point.

SUGGESTED PRICE FOR TUMBLR PREMIUM: $2.00

ESTIMATED NET RETURN (($2 x 0.971) - $0.30): about $1.64

So

I ungenerously estimate the current Tumblr premium gets them $6.50/revenue versus my suggested $1.64/revenue.

Seems bad?!

Let's do a bit more math.

How many users at $2/base ($1.64 profit) would it take to cover the income of 1 user at $7/base ($6.50 income)?

6.50 / 1.64... 3.96341463415

I will uh go ahead and

round up

to 4 users

So. 1 user = $6.50 (6.50 x 1) profit. 4 users = $6.56 ($1.64 x 4) profit.

we'll just let the ol' tumblr keep them there six cents and call it even an even swap

Now.

To be fair.

To make this work.

You have to attract 3 more users (1 versus 4) to pay.

This feels like a lot!

Until it doesn't!

Because personally.

I would pay $2.00/month to keep this site running. Feels like a rounding error in my books.

I flinch at $7.00/month. Feels weird to pay this much for a site that so regularly has "hm, this disasterous new feature is pissing me off."

:)

But

as always

what do i know.

To satisfy my various spoken and unspoken life/art studio ambitions I offer this as a free consultancy lesson to anyone making a patreon or paid newsletter or whatever thing -- where you have a digital product that does not require shipping, handling, etc.

You can make it expensive and aim to have a small audience.

You can make it cheap and aim to have a large audience.

I personally am really fond of cheap digital services because it feels like support when I realize I have not had time to keep up. When I do have time to keep up -- "Oh this is a great value"

And when I do not, I see the bill -- "Ah, I am glad THING exists. Happy to throw them a few coins."

In respect to my soul, please use this lesson exclusively for such things as

art

music

thinly-veiled self-insert fan fiction

non-tax evasion accounting practices

joyous pornography or other erotic silliness

history (all years available)

claymation

cartooning

books (novels or things longer or shorter)

poetry (erotic or non)

coffee

fiction

non-fiction

non-non fiction

non-fiction fiction

and, of course, real reviews of faux products that should exist, but do not, due to limitations of time, space, money, reality, magic, technology, theology, methodology, organic chemistry, biology (marine, terra), cosmology, topology and/or cartography

anything fun

thank you and good night

for at least

Hey everyone! One of my favorite ways to customize my powerchair is to make joystick toppers. Here is a tutorial on the way I consider the easiest

You will need:

A pair of scissors

Rubber animal of your choice (I get mine from claw machines, a lot of restaurants and arcades have ones that are play ‘till you win with these)

Optionally is an exacto knife or similar tool, it makes the first cuts easier but it is doable with scissors

Step 1:

On the bottom of your rubber animal you will see a small hole, around that hole make three short cuts in a triangle pattern

Step 2: connect those cuts to each other making a larger hole by trimming off the rubber between them. Depending on the thickness of your joystick you can make it smaller or larger to fit.

Step 3: line up the hole in the animal with the head of the joystick, if it is the right size it should slide on easily but not be too loose.

Visuals included below and the final product (the one I have on right now)

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

My second favorite game after Majora's Mask!

And this forces you to decide whether your autonomy matters to you more than the approval of the group - while they'll still act like you're on thin ice either way, if you give in at this point they know you're theirs forever, because now they've established a foothold, you've shown a moral weakness, which they will brand you with so it can be used against you in the future ("hey RICE-addict here doesn't want help break into the city records office") to force you to double-down and isolate you further.