WARNING: THIS ACCOUNT IS OLD AF, I STARTED OUT NOT KNOWING HOW TO TAG AND AT THIS POINT IM TOO AFRAID TO START.
I don't think that this needs a description, but Matt's a fuckboy. I really like iced coffee. Icon by ummmmandy on tumblr :)
whenever i click the cc button on a youtube video that clearly has a high budget and is made by a fucking studio and i see “english - auto generated” i spit daggers from my eyes and mouth at whoever decided to not pay someone to make actual captions
Meanwhile every time I watch a video clearly made by one guy in his living room and it has complete descriptive subtitles, I feel more love in me than I can contain.
flatid planthopper nymph, Singapore. hemipterans (true bugs) like these have mastered the art of covering oneself in weird waxy filaments, which are shed along with their last juvenile molt, revealing a sleek, gossamer-winged adult
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka “raptures of the deep”
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you’re good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here’s what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they’re not dying, they’re not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he’d told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he’s at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can’t go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
It’s an underdog story about classism in which the folk hero (Johnny) is confronted by a powerful man (the Devil) who tries to exploit the hero’s perceived ignorance and inferiority by offering a great reward with impossible odds. Although Johnny warns him that looks can be deceiving, and that he’s going to regret the dare because Johnny is the “best there’s ever been”, the devil is blinded by his greed and arrogance.
The devil creates an awful cacophony of technically excellent fiddle playing that would be impossible for Johnny to replicate. It’s a trick.
But Johnny just grins at him and starts to play “simple” classic country fiddling songs - Fire On The Mountain, House Of The Rising Sun, and Daddy Cut Her Bill Off. He doesn’t rise to beat the Devil - he simply creates his own music from his home, in the style that he knows, and his love of it and the familiarity of the music make his “backwoods” fiddling more perfect than the Devil could ever achieve.
It is thus the devil’s pride, not Johnny’s, that allows Johnny to Bugs Bunny his way into a golden fiddle.
(In that sense, I do agree that it is the most American song: in a land of prejudice and inequities, great power lies - dormant but ever-present - in those we underestimate and attempt to exploit.)
