off the cuff & out of pocket

choose a country, pick a decade, and GO!!

you’ll get an endless streaming of songs (ad free!).

People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.

So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.

The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.

Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.

When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring

When you see a properly dark starscape

You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky

You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.

The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.

And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.

You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.

The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks

I’d often set an alarm to wake me in the middle of the night, so it was as dark as possible and my eyes as dark-adapted as they coud get, and starlight alone was enough to guide me

this update fucking sucks. im not defending it. but tumblr is never going to roll back on it because it would cause a legal nightmare for them when theyre already losing money. the alternative here is that they make it so people in the uk and brazil just cannot access the website.

i think what would be more productive is instead spreading resources on how to protest governments against these laws, and to spread resources on how to get around it (e.g. trustworthy free vpns. i personally use the free version of proton vpn)

another thing to protest would be how it's being implemented in addition to tumblrs shitty system to flag mature content

something steam does to prove you're over 18 is allow you to add a credit card as a payment method (you don't have to buy anything with it, it just has to be saved to your account). this still sucks but, to me at least, it feels far more reasonable than giving your id.

demanding they go back on it just isnt reasonable. this is something beyond tumblr.

Artemis II Mission Commander Reid Wiseman to the camera after being told his kids are in the viewing booth at Mission Control in Houston 😭