I will! Because I’ve spent a lot of time in the air and I’m very much alive and well. 🙂 It’s okay to be scared of things that you don’t fully understand, but airplanes are as safe as they are exciting and cool. I sometimes wish they were a little less safe so I didn’t have to deal with constant maintenance and worrying about NASA reports, but that’s just how aviation goes.
If you want to get over a fear of flying, I recommend checking out programs like SOAR— or even trying out a discovery flight at your local airport! Not… going into random pilots’ Tumblr inboxes to be unkind. The world is really beautiful from above.
i have a lot of feelings and thoughts about coelacanths today
like… they’re blue
you have this mysterious fish that no one really cared about, because everyone assumed they’d gone extinct with the dinosaurs. an interesting footnote, but one of many, many fossil species.
and later the coelacanth gets some fame as a so-called “missing link” species, a theory which is now outdated (and not accurate for coelacanths) but was really influential at the time. because they have some weird biological quirks – bones in fins! – people were like “oh, they must be a missing link.” so the coelacanth was launched into some fame with the theory of evolution. it got brought up a lot. drawn in old textbooks as proof.
and then a fisherman finds a weird fish off the coast of south africa and calls a local fish expert who had let it be known she was interested in weird finds, and he brings her the (unfortunately badly rotted) corpse and she’s like “well, this is sure weird,” and sends off the bones to other experts, who start to quietly freak out, and rush to south africa, and rewards are offered for another one, any other one, and a few years later one is caught and frozen before rotting.
and it’s this incredible discovery, this extinct creature come to life (the prehistoric coelacanth lived in swamps and marshes in south america; these now are deep ocean fish in and around the indian ocean, but it’s still recognizably the same species)!
but it’s also blue.
not like, muddy blue, or tumblr-default-background blue.
proper shimmering sapphire blue and white. almost turquoise in some lights. this like… muddy, fossil creature. always drawn in dinosaur browns and grays. and it’s alive and it’s blue. just imagine being the scientist who opened that crate to this creature for the first time. you’re already excited, you’ve known about this fish for decades, you thought it was a story, you know it’s in this box. you expect to see the weird fins and the strange tail. you know it’s large and odd looking. and you open it up and it’s this beautiful, shining blue, you know?
finally learning how i wanna draw again…. thinking i am gonna ditch lineart alltogether because i hate it 🙂 and i have always hated it so might as well stop fighting with it
a comparison bc this is sort of a redraw bc i was frustrated i couldnt draw navarre this good again since this first drawing LOL
If you ever want to make a post like this, you should actually: 1) not make that post 2) shut up.
I need you to know the following: It is SO GODDAMN tiring to hear, you’re not funny, or clever, you’ve not said anything new, and that comment is not fixing problems.
FURTHERMORE: there is an entrenched system in Texas to make sure the people in power STAY in power. There are many people in Texas (I’m one) that don’t like what’s going on here, but it’s an uphill battle.
abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don’t wanna lose the rights to them
Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don’t want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we’re certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They’re crying about opportunity cost for a product they’re not even selling.
op i know you’re probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science – my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company’s out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it’s a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computersthat are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can’t be converted.
for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.
so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go “well op just wants old video games to play” (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y’all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.
