Genuinely fucked that cultural perception of aging is getting warped to the point where people in their twenties are considered old at the same time that all the constructed milestones of independence and self sufficiency that have become expected of adulthood are getting further out of reach for the majority of people. Like, no, you haven’t missed out on anything, no one has “wasted” their 20s, or 30s, or any stretch of time, it’s just that a lot of things really fucking suck right now. There isn’t anything important you can do at, say, age 21 that you can’t also do every other age after that.
Fun fact! Decibel is a logarithmic scale. This means an increase of 10 dB is a doubling in strength.
It’s impossible to get a sound louder than about 200 dB on Earth: this is because a soundwave is a series of peaks and troughs of air compression, and around 200 dB you hit COMPLETE VACUUM in the troughs.
So, decibels are a measure of energy.. 400 dB is around 10^28. By the Atomic Rockets Boom Table, the dinosaur-killer impact was merely 10^23.
400 dB is “all the oceans flash boil off the planet and then the crust melts”. This rabbit just destroyed all life on earth with a noise equivalent to an exaton of TNT. Aliens on pluto are getting woken up going “what the fuck was that light?”
I will never get over how weird it feels to have tragic and emotional chapters of your life where you just also still go to work, and the grocery store, and see funny videos online all while feeling such paralyzing fear and heartache
Be open to the possibility that people are speaking nicely about you behind your back. People are conspiring about ways to help you. People advocating for you. People are genuinely rooting for you behind your back.
“damn I’m crying over an insect” “why am I having such strong feelings over how the sky looks” “it’s weird how happy this small thing made me feel” THAT’S BECAUSE YOU LIVE HERE!!!! you live on this earth. everything all the time is an experience, no matter how common or mundane. this world is unique. so are its small moments. it is good to enjoy a tiny thing. you love the world even at its smallest scale.
When Cleopatra welcomed Mark Antony to her bedroom, the floor was covered in a foot and a half of such petals. Did they use the floor, and make love in a swamp of soft, fragrant, shimmying petals? Or did they use the bed, as if they were on a raft floating in a scented ocean?
Cleopatra knew her guest. Few people have been as obsessed with roses as the ancient Romans. Roses were strewn at public ceremonies and banquets; rose water bubbled through the emperor’s fountains and the public baths surged with it; in the public amphitheaters, crowds sat under sun awnings steeped in rose perfume; rose petals were used as pillow stuffings; people wore garlands of roses in their hair; they ate rose pudding; their medicines, love potions, and aphrodisiacs all contained roses. No bacchanalia, the Romans’ official orgy, was complete without an excess of roses. They created a holiday, Rosalia, to formally consummate their passion for the flower. At one banquet, Nero had silver pipes installed under each plate, so that guests could be spritzed with scent between courses. They could admire a ceiling painted to resemble the celestial heavens, which would open up and shower them in a continuous rain of perfume and flowers. At another, he spent the equivalent of $160,000 just on roses—and one of his guests smothered to death under a shower of rose petals.
— Diane Ackerman, ‘Smell: Roses’ A Natural History of the Senses
I love seeing list memes where someone makes a “le cool people vs le cringe” and they obviously skew it so they barely scrape by into the cool kids club
