Call me Blue

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
derinthescarletpescatarian
beemovieerotica

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 👍

elodieunderglass

👍

underwater horrors
neil-gaiman

insanedeathwish asked:

Hi Mr. Gaiman, I'm not sure if you'll read this in time but I thought I'd try anyways. I'm not sure how familiar you are with US government and bills, but there's one that Congress is looking to pass that is only bad news.

It's called KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) and the basis is that it's censorship and for people to use social media sites they will have to upload their government ID or drivers license to shows that they are over 18.

It gives the government unprecedented control over the internet. I'm sure you can see the consequences of this as it would endanger kids trying to escape unsafe environments, identify theft would skyrocket because all of this sensitive data can be accessed easily, this bill would also allow parents of minors to see everything the kid does online which is obviously not good and can be deadly for the child.

This bill would also affect people globally since any company from the US would have to Comply or be sued, so this isn't just a problem for people in the US.

Also fun fact! Tumblr is a US company.

I thought I'd try reaching out to you since you can reach more people than I can and I really admire you. With that being said, sorry if I made your day worse with this news.

I just feel like not enough people know about it. I've also included 2 links, one is a petition to stop KOSA which you can sign even if you're not in the US or are a minor. The other is a link to Bad Internet Bills, which provides more information on KOSA and other bad internet bills. The second link provides much more information, so you can understand it better. Also sorry if the links don't work, Tumblr didn't want them to be links.

Stop KOSA

Bad Internet Bills

I hope you have a wonderful day or night or whatever time you're reading this. Also how are doing? And do you have any advice on editing a piece of writing? For context I'm used to writing shorter pieces but I wrote a long one and I'm editing it but I'm not sure how to go about it since it's a long piece for me and I get stressed every time I try to edit it.

P.S. - Please ignore my bad grammar and sentence structure.

neil-gaiman answered:

Thank you for the information.

crab-day-counter
getvalentined

I love how everyone is like "Why can't tumblr just be user-funded?" and then riot when someone suggests paying for ad-free or buying crabs.

My pal. My guy. My dude. That is what "user-funded" means. That is how something works when it is user-funded. In order for something to be user-funded, the users must fund it. You, a user, will have to give some of your funds to tumblr. That's how this works.

Why can't tumblr just be user-funded? Because people like you are adamantly, viciously, violently against any and all attempts calling for users to fund it.

We're gonna wake up one day and this platform will have evaporated into the ether and y'all are gonna say it's all @staff's fault because they could have just switched to a user-funded model (they're trying) and brought back porn (they're getting there) but they didn't (these are long-term goals they've been working on for years), and clearly the fact that you attacked people for even suggesting that you offer a dime and never bothered to learn shit about FOSTA/SESTA has nothing at all to do with it.

Anyway support @crab-day-counter.

crab-day-counter

Thanks! Terrorize your friends with crabs and ad free.

bluealexa

I also want to point out to those insisting that there are better things to spend money on

Yes. There is. And crabs are cheaper than a pint of Ben and Jerry’s

I’m not putting the money I budget for charity into this. I’m putting the “this is a horrible idea” money on buying a single user some crabs. This is the same place I get the money for video games that I may or may not actually play for more than 10 hours, as well as ice creams and more catnip for my cat.

If you aren’t trying to come at me and complain that I spent too much on ice cream and not enough on charity, then please knock it off talking about the crabs.

I’m not putting money towards crab day with any expectation that it’ll guarantee the site will move in the direction I want. It’s fun and it may possibly help? It might not. But I also buy people lunch at work with no expectations that they will pay me back regardless of their promises.

crab day i mean the only promised result is a fun day with crab attacks
eternal-fractal
harvestspriteirl: “the-haiku-bot: “truebeasty: “fullmetalfisting: “I didn’t realize this was about wind I just thought the lady was having a bad day ” americans will measure in anything but the metric system ” americans will measure in anything...
fullmetalfisting

I didn’t realize this was about wind I just thought the lady was having a bad day

truebeasty

americans will measure in anything but the metric system

the-haiku-bot

americans will

measure in anything but

the metric system

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

harvestspriteirl

Haters will see you use a real life example for the common person and go “why isn’t this formatted in the mathematics from a different country”

dduane
bliss-bliss-bliss-bliss

image

Fanfolks today need to remember how important The Premise was.

Y'all have heard of The Premise, right?

See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, "pastiches"), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.

Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that's the main perspective I'm gonna consider here.

image

How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960's before the internet?

Carefully.

Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn't touch them.

And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960's.

Guess how cool everyone else was about this.

Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling "I mean, who wouldn't?"

But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various "sodomy" and "decency" laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man's cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)

It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.

image

Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.

These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that's objectively amazing.

Raise a toast to our fanfiction elders, who simped in the darkness so we could simp in the light of day.

iliadette

This is important and should have more notes.

Star Trek fandom fandom elders this is another layer of why ao3 is important because we can write and know that no one will destroy the works we submit there