and after discussing the Just Really Big Corn more with the person in question, I have some more information about the offending Really Big Corn (the pic is coming up dont worry):
-for those who are new to Exactly How Fucked Up Corn Is, corn, or Zea mays, is comprised of many varieties (called ‘landraces’) native to central and south america. They were first bred by the native peoples in the region from an ancient grass called Teosinte that’s still around today. theyre really fucked up. i cant talk about it here but trust me there’s a reason some people devote their entire lives to studying it
-the lab in question is a maize genomics lab, and does a lot of work with these landraces. sometimes this work involves bringing various kinds up to their lab at my university in Iowa to grow in test plots for experiments. you can see where this is going
-so the supercorn itself. the supercorn in question is actually a collection of a few different landraces from the valleys of mexico and south america. they are naturally taller than what we would consider ‘normal’ corn in their native environment, but like corn generally is when brought to Iowa, they’re really fucking happy here and are a little bit taller than their natural height to show for it (we get longer days here then they get where they’re from, resulting in the plant getting slightly different growth signals, so on so forth)
-i got the height wrong in the tags on the original post. my friend is 5 foot 7, not 5 foot 5. this corn is over 20 feet (6 meters) tall. they were grown from seed in this test plot. she says the stalks are as thick as bamboo to compensate for the sheer height. behold the image that’s haunted me for literally months:
big.
In costa rica theres a single corn stalk thats grown 45 feet. it has it’s own greenhouse!
This made me nearly bite a pencil in half in enraged memory.
@ THE REST OF MY ANCIENT HISTORY CLASS; Y’ALL ARE WELCOME FOR THAT FUCKIN A THE REST OF YOU DID NO GODDAMN WORK FOR
Oh man, so I know everyone hates group projects with ample good reason, but lemme just tell you something that happened to me in my final year of uni. My dad got real sick and was in and out of hospital numerous times, one time with a suspected heart attack. Which meant my mum ended up caring for my dad, and I wound up caring for my disabled brother, on top of working a part time job and going to university full time.
My grades slid dramatically. I was having to appeal nearly all my results with my professors, and was mercifully granted extensions by all but one of them. (Which, if you’re out there Ronald: stub your toe and step on lego for the rest of eternity.) And then our Revolutionary Cultures prof. assigned a group project, and paired us at random with our classmates. And I knew, I knew I was just going to be a dead weight so I went to my new buddy and told them we should go to the profs office and ask for her to be switched to someone else who wasn’t just going to drag them down. And my new best buddy for the rest of the semester looked at me, looked at our assigned project, and very gently started to cry as she told me “I was just about to say the same thing to you,” and then tearfully told me her mum was dying, and the only reason she hadn’t dropped out to take care of her was because her mum wanted to see her graduate. She’d been given six months and we graduated in five. Provided we finished this class. And we were both out of appeals and leniency time.
It’s probably one of my most vivid memories from the whole college experience, just sitting on the floor of the Renaissance Lit corridor hugging someone who until a moment ago had been a relative stranger known only in passing, and trying to tell them it would be okay, we’d get the paper done. And we did. We scraped a C- together between the two of us and we managed to coast over the passing mark for the class and were allowed to graduate with abysmal but passing marks.
And I still think about her all the time. Especially when I wind up in group projects for work, and it feels like no one else is shouldering any of the burden, I make a note to reach out and say “hey, you don’t seem to be engaging with this much, are you okay?”
And a lot of the time it shocks people. They’re not expecting earnest concern for their lack of interest, and you find out things like their kid is sick, their dog just died, they’ve got health issues going on, or sometimes they just don’t know where to begin with the project and didn’t want to tell you that because they were frightened of being judged or perceived as lazy when they’re just overwhelmed.
And I honestly wish things like this were taught in team building exercises, cause that’s what group projects in school are. They’re supposed to be teaching you how to work well with others and achieve a common goal, while at the same time totally skipping over the fundamentals of human interaction and how to engage socially with others, and it’s fucking bullshit.
You see how she explained how race is a social construct (it is) while ALSO SAYING THAT RACISM EXISTS AND IS FUCKED UP? You see how she did that? Don’t mistake this for colorblindness because it clearly isn’t.
Hey there US friends! If you’re voting using these machines (Hart eSlate) or similar ones right now or in the near future, make sure that the machine has NOT changed your ballot before casting it, ‘k? It’s apparently an already known problem, and has been for years, but has never been fixed.
2: Disney acknowledges and prepares show creators that their show will, most definitely, become porn.
3: Disney has examples on hand of how said show will, most definitely, become porn.
Pffft!!!!!
Disney doesn’t just have examples of said porn!!
Ok story time. Yeaaaars ago i dated an animator chick. During that short time together we ran around a lot and met a bunch of industry people in our area.
One of them used to work for Disney. So we are hanging out at his apartment and conversation being what it is he kinda says “hold on” and goes off to dig in the closet. He comes back and sets down a couple STACKS (and im talking foot high) of printer paper.
What followed were a couple hours of hysterical laughing as we paged through “a history of Disney animation- porn edition”
See Disney has this weird rule in their artist contracts- everything you create while in their employ is THEIRS. Even in the off time. Its one of the reasons they are reviled in the industry. But the rule was set in place to basically steal good ideas from their staff or force them to ONLY work on Disney ip’s while employed.
The jokes on them though. They didn’t count on most artists being giant perverts (this story is also why i laugh when people tell me drawing smut will ‘ruin your art career’)
So! Disney being bastards ended up earning them smut of everything they’ve ever created. And also per their policies they had to keep it. Every artist knew about the smut vault and our buddy here had photocopied a chunk of it. Yes… 2-3 feet of smut was just a chunk of it.
Snow white? Rescue rangers? Goofy? Minnie? Micky? Beauty and the beast? Aladdin? Yup you name it it was there. Some of it was mild. The topless little mermaid stuff made sense at least. Some was raunchy as hell. ALL OF IT in the animation style of the films and shows.
So yes, not only does Disney know there will be porn, have the porn, but they official porn.
Let’s say someone is looking for porn and they put “wife caught her husband cheating,” into Google. There are a lot of porn sites (and some news sites) with that title. So Google has to decide which order to show them in, because most of the time, people pick something off the first few pages of Google.
Google wants to have the very best “wife caught her husband cheating” (or whatever else you search for) sites on the first page of the search. Google has several ways to try and decide which site are the best, but one of them is that it looks at how popular it is by seeing how many other websites link to it. If a lot of other sites are linking to it, it was probably useful to them, so Google will put it on the front page.
So if I’m a sleazy pornsite owner, I could create like a thousand websites and make them all link to my “wife caught her husband cheating” site, and act like a whole bunch of different websites thought it was pretty great. They’d be like “xdfgt .com”, “xdfgy .com”, “xdfgh .com,” just nonsense addresses nobody else was using, or whatever. I’d try to make Google think my site was awesome, because all these other websites are linking to it.
But Google has already caught on to that. Google would know “xdfgt .com” was a crappy fake website, because nobody else is linking to “xdfgt .com”. Any website that is only linked to by crap websites is also crap, as far as Google is concerned. Google won’t put it on the first pages of search results.
So instead let’s imagine the sleazy pornsite owner creates a thousand fake tumblrs instead, like “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and “xdfgy.tumblr .com” and “xdfgh.tumblr .com” and just puts one or two posts on them to add links to the “wife caught her husband cheating” porn site. Google can still tell those tumblrs are crap websites, because nobody else is linking to them. But the difference is … on tumblr, the sleazy pornsite owner can make your website link to him.
Let’s say your tumblr is “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com”. If “xdfgt.tumblr .com” likes one of your posts, there’s link on your blogto “xdfgt.tumblr .com.” Somewhere on “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” it will say “xdfgt liked this” with a link from your blog to “xdfgt.tumblr .com.”
Google’s bot looks at “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” and it sees that your blog is a good website. People are linking to it (talking to you or reblogging from you), you write like an actual human being, you have nice pictures, you update sometimes, you aren’t a bot. So Google decides your blog isn’t a crappy scam website. Then it sees the link to “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and it thinks “oh hey, a nice website with good stuff written by a real human linked to this “xdfgt.tumblr .com” I guess maybe “xdfgt.tumblr .com” is a decent website too.”
Then it looks at “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and it sees the link to the porn site with “wife caught her husband cheating”, and it says, “well, I guess that “wife caught her husband cheating” site is a good site. I know that because there’s a good site linking to it here at “xdfgt.tumblr .com.” I know “xdfgt.tumblr .com” is a good site because “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” linked to it, and I know “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” is a good site because it is updated and writes like a real person and people talk to it and link to it.”
So basically the porn bots are using the fact that you have a good blog to make themselves look better and to try and trick Google’s bot into thinking they’re very popular and it should put them at the top of its list when people search Google for porn.
It’s really annoying! It would be really nice if the people running tumblr figured out a way to not be free advertising for every sleazy porn site on the internet
hey wow thats actually really useful! and its written in a way that i (a bird with no knowledge of the wizardly internal workings of a website) can understand!
rip tumblr 