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a worm spent 100 years transforming into a capital N, then gave birth to a new worm to hold on its head. life is beautiful

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yeah im into bdsm Be Dozing So Much

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big whoop, give me 20 minutes on grindr on any college campus in the country and I can do the same thing

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I call this one Having A Nap With Chronic Pain

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these are fun looking

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Alright, I think I like tumblr now.

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.

You really, truly, cannot get this on any other website.

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Great on top of everything else now we gotta deal with The Giant Sphere

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god actually baited us into creating the tower of babel so that He could create His most beloved children: autistic linguistics enthusiasts

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first day as a small-town sherif and you discover that some of the convicts you're transporting managed to escape in the night and since the penalty for letting prisoners escape is death, and the penalty for being late because you were looking for escaped prisoners is also death, you decide to free ALL of them and go hide out in the wilderness for a bit, except the convicts are super grateful so they make you their leader and it turns out they're decent guys who were exploited by a tyrannical government, so long story short you're crowd-sourcing for a peasant uprising and would anyone like to chip in?

3650th day and due to a series of unforeseen events you are now the emperor and founder of the han dynasty.

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and a shoutout to the two Māori men who travelled to Vienna in 1859, got themselves apprenticed as printers (and incidentally became accomplished ballroom dancers), and finally had an audience with Franz Josef where they charmed him so much that he sent a printing press to New Zealand….which was promptly used from 1861 to print the newspaper of the Kingitanga anti-colonial movement.

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so i wore a pride flag pin to work the other day and the kids were all interested (obviously) (find me a classroom of preschoolers who are not obsessed with rainbows) (i'll wait) so they crowded around to see.

"aww!" they said, "it's a flag!!"

but the thing is: they're little. a lot of them don't really have a handle on all their mouth sounds yet.

such as, notably, that tricky tricky "L" sound.

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My friend claimed he could play Flight of the Bumblebee and accompany himself. Then he did this.

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that your brain on chatGPT article that has been buzzing around the news is some massive horseshit btw. It's definitely not a scientific article, Time, and I would be extremely hard-pressed to even call it a preprint when it is a whopping 200 pages long and has an introduction that looks like this:

this is very much an example of what I and XKCD like to call a PDF.

Some scientist wrote this with the intent very much being to have their research make a big splash in the press without giving properly qualified peer reviewers a chance to tear it apart and I do not read that as a sign of confidence in the results. I would be extremely wary of taking anything in it seriously.

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ALEJANDRO PINO

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i have witnessed more than one german struggle with "wefwidgewatoh"

One of my anodyne yet highly amusing sources of fun is listening to French-speakers try to pronounce “smoussie”…

… “smoufie”…

… sorry: “smoothie”.