Uh oh! The Oracle has killed herself rather than face the future she foresaw. Market analysts are speculating this may be bad for the economy
ALTCan hardly believe it but Barnes & Noble picked my book “The Bakery Dragon” as the overall winner of their 2025 Children’s and YA Book Awards! This is such an unexpected honor, and truly doesn’t feel real still! It wasn’t long ago that this book was just a single drawing and a brain-wyrm of an idea. Thank you SO so much to every single person who supported and shared that drawing and encouraged me to take this little guy so far. I couldn’t have done it without you, and you received a special shoutout in my B&N blog about the win. And if you can believe it, I get to make even more! Book 2 is coming out in a few short months in October. I can’t wait to see how far Ember can fly!
If Tumblr and Ao3 can get married, I think what is going on between Critical Role and Dropout lately is a metaphor to them fucking nasty
we need to go back to eating spaghetti the traditional way. no more of this fork and spoon nonsense
you guys are doing it all wrong
eating spaghetti with their bare hands was good enough for generations of Neapolitans, but suddenly you're too fancy for it?
respect your goddamn elders—chow down by the fistful!
Spin the wheel. That's who's trying to kill you.
Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.
(If you have zero idea about the name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)
Are you safe?
Absolutely not. I'm dead. 100% dead.
I might stay alive, but it'll be a really close thing.
I'll take some hits, for certain, but I should be okay in the end.
A few attacks might get through, but nothing concerning.
The attacker might be able to get in one lucky hit. If that.
I am the opposite of worried. I'm 100% safe.
…Look. I've tried picturing this. But I honestly don't know how to answer.
(Six months ago, I did a version of this poll with about five hundred options on the spinner wheel. For this one, I more than doubled it.)
Do these articles bug anyone else?
Like, that isn't how money works.
Based on current market prices, that would be 1.35 billion metric tons of gold.
If that much gold was suddenly put into circulation, it would go from $2300 per ounce to $1 per ounce.
You just made gold as valuable as mediocre coffee grounds.
Potato chips are roughly a dollar per ounce.
Name brand shampoo.
You get the idea.
We need a useful asteroid, not a golden one.
Let's get some cobalt or lithium.
OR... if we found a giant space balloon full of helium, that would be fantastic. Cuz we are running low. And for some reason we are still filling party favors with it.
@elmofongo It's so bad.
I'm about to make a lot of people angry about helium (if they weren't already aware).
Liquid helium is the best substance we have to supercool shit. I'm talking very very cold. Helium cooling systems can get us within millionths of a degree above absolute zero.
Almost all groundbreaking modern science requires cooling shit down.
We are working on room temperature superconductors that don't require supercooling, but progress has been slow. We are pretty sure it is possible in theory, but it's unclear if a practical, scalable solution could ever be found.
So until then, we need to make things really frickin' cold.
Helium is vital for cooling the magnets in MRI scanners. If we run out of helium and the magical room temp conductor isn't invented, MRIs will literally be useless.
Pretty much all of our space hardware uses helium.
Particle physics research is dependent on supercolliders. No helium, no smashing protons together to see what happens.
Oh, were you excited about quantum computing helping to cure cancer?
Gotta have that cold ass helium.
8% of our total helium supply is used for party balloons.
I know that may not sound like a lot. But once the helium is gone... it is fucking GONE.
We cannot synthesize more and there isn't an alternative that can take over supercooling duties.
While we won't completely run out for hundreds of years, it will get more and more scarce. It could only be 30 years before helium is so rare that it will need to be rationed. It will become exorbitantly expensive and only the people with the most funding will have access to it.
So... enjoy your $10,000 "Get Well Soon" balloon in the hospital after getting a $50,000 MRI scan.
The infuriating part of this... no one cares.
There has been almost no success getting political bodies to regulate the non-essential use of helium.
So 8% of our helium goes into balloons and either leaks away into the atmosphere or goes into people's lungs so they can sound like a chipmunk.
Can we get more helium from space?
There is a lot of helium on the moon. And maybe in a hundred years we could figure out a way to bring it back to Earth.
Our best chance is if a helium-filled asteroid flew towards Earth at the perfect angle so it gets caught in orbit. If it burns up in the atmosphere, we'd lose the helium. If it crashes on Earth, we'd lose the helium.
I'd say the chances of that are 1 in a number so big it would take you a day to count all the zeros.
If we develop our space program to the point where we can go to the asteroid belt and land on things and mine them, we could probably reclaim some helium. But that would probably happen long after we have a serious helium scarcity.
Our only chance to realistically solve this problem within our lifetimes is room temperature superconductors.
But it would be really nice if we stopped putting this vital shit inside of balloons that kids play with for 20 seconds and forget about.
stepped on a plum (overripe plum) (barefoot) it was on the driveway got out of the car and accidentally (didn't know it was there) stepped on the plum (warm) (on the ground) (it had fallen from the tree) barefoot (no shoes) wearing long pants (too long) (need to hem them) plum viscera got on them (the pants) unexpected plum on the driveway (hot plum) (97 degrees out) already super hungover (throwing up all morning) (should not have been driving at all) and I stepped out of the car (black car) (97 degrees out) and onto the plum (unexpected) (didn't know the plum was there) and it burst (plum nightmare on my only good pair of sweatpants) still we find ways to keep ourselves going from day to day
Achievement Unlocked: Meatspace Containment Breach
2026 booktok discourse: sad books are a cognitohazard (they make you sad)
unfortunately some people on twitter are very literally already there
ALT
Same genre I fear
The ideal book is 500 blank pages which act as a safe space that allows the reader full control over the narrative without running the risk of nonconsentually forcing their train of thought or violating their cognitive boundaries
idk why but there is something unusually funny to me about Will Wood using social media extremely sparingly but making an exception to post this long ass rant about how much he hates the Netflix Wednesday show on his youtube community page
And he's right
