The Thing Is

BY ELLEN BASS

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

cotylorhyncalcancer:

cecilias-cool-stuff:
cryptotheism:
cryptotheism:
I’ve been on a White People Expedition Diary kick recently. I see why Lovecraft was fucking obsessed with this as a framing device, they are insanely compelling.
July 17th, 1884: “Food supplies are low. The Dutchman has eaten so many dog livers that he is now hallucinating from vitamin A poisoning, which is a thing that can happen apparently.”
July 18: “We kicked that faggy Austrian botanist into a ravine. Lmao. Had a lovely bath.”
July 19th 1884: “The Dutchman has been confined to the sled. We have sacrificed our belts to restrain his movements, lest we lose another Austrian to his Poop Madness.”
July 20th 1884: “The men are demanding I leave behind my bathtub. I will not.”
My fave part of the doomed Franklin expedition:
Haven’t recovered from the first Spanish expedition onto the Great Plains, “the grass is endless” yeah it is

Anonymous asked:

Is spider silk being as strong as steel another lie from childhood? Bc you're able to break it pretty easily on accident. Genuinely asking.

the-haiku-bot:

bunjywunjy:
spider silk IS actually significantly stronger pound-for-pound than the same amount of steel, but only in one direction! and coincidentally, it’s the same exact direction that got a bunch of people killed in a submersible last month.
see, when people talk about the “strength” of spider silk versus steel, they’re specifically talking about tensile strength:
which is specifically the measure of the strength of a material when two forces are pulling at it from the ends, like when a steel cable is holding up a bridge support, or crane cargo:
or like when a strand of silk is supporting the entire spider.
that’s tensile strength, baby!
but there’s another type of strength that’s very important to take into consideration when you’re actually building things like bridges and submersibles, and spider silk and similar materials like carbon fiber are absolutely garbage at it! and that’s compressive strength.
this is basically the inverse of tensile strength, where instead of being yanked at from both ends, the forces are crushing inwards at the material from both directions instead.
you can expect to see these kinds of forces involved in road surfaces, vehicle engines, and again, submersibles.
now steel and its more competent cousin titanium are fucking GREAT at compressive strength! the harder the outside forces are compressing them, the stronger the metals get.
NOT TODAY, FUCKERS
but strand-based materials like spider silk and, again, carbon fiber, are fucking garbage at this. they can take a certain amount of pressure, but each round with compressive forces snaps some of the strands that makes up the material! and those don’t grow back, so basically you’re just gradually reducing your poor overstressed carbon-fiber hull into a completely useless shell of shattered thread fragments over time as the strands of fiber that actually give it strength die off one by one.
and eventually, something’s gotta give! and then people die about it.
this is why, even though spider silk IS stronger than steel in one specific way, we’re never going to stop using steel in industrial applications and switch over to spider silk or carbon fiber full time. these materials all have their areas of use, and steel just covers a wider base of applications.
and don’t even get me started on shear strength. we’ll be here all damn day.
and don’t even get
me started on shear strength. we’ll
be here all damn day.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

modogoblin:

platypusisnotonfire:

tiktoksthataregood-ish:
Obsessed with the fact that this wasn’t a fluke and they are clearly training this cat to dj.

comment-tube:

techniccolor:

sing us a song youre the slender man

weirdyearbook:

From Littleton College’s 1907 yearbook.

thefrogman:

sirfrogsworth:
sirfrogsworth:
I think one of the most frustrating things about modern conservatives is when they hate something for the wrong reason. And then you have to defend something you also hate.
“I hate Disney!”
“Yes, their view on labor has been…”
“Because of their woke garbage movies!”
“Oh.”
“I am sick of these Disney remakes!”
“Yeah, it would be nice if they focused on creating original IPs instead of copy/paste remakes of animated classics.”
“They cast a black mermaid!”
“Oh.”
“Facebook is evil!”
“Yeah, selling user data without consent was…”
“They deleted my post about whites being replaced!”
“Oh.”

earthtodes:

I open and close this app like it’s the fucking fridge

zoethebitch:

the same spirit that exists within me exists within you. many of you are me but younger. you will find the resolve you seek. few of you are me but older. I love you as I love myself