Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th
No guys you don’t understand.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
It’s so funny to me how I like tmnt not just one specific version but the whole franchise. Interacting with the fandom feels like talking about our cats to another cat lover; it’s amazing.
when gerard way sings “the broken, the beaten, and the damned” and when kermit the frog sings “the lovers, the dreamers, and me” they’re talking about the same people btw
While at this moment this measure can be considered symbolic (the policy it repeals was rendered unenforceable by the Supreme Court in 2015, just like for the rest of the US), it assures that if Obergefell is overturned, and same-sex marriage policy localizes, the Navajo Nation will still uphold marriage equality*
*there could end up being a fight with Arizona state government in that scenario, as tribal sovereignty vs state authority is constantly fought on an issue by issue basis.
I think it also probably matters a lot to Diné who see the laws of their own nation as significantly more important than settler law, even when the latter take precedence throughout the whole federal nation, you know?
The original Act that banned it comes from 2005 - codifying the ban was a response to the Shrub’s significant campaigning against same-sex marriage. IIRC people within the nation have been working hard to attempt to push it back for almost twenty years, and it’s not necessarily been easy.
So I think it’s more than just symbolic regardless, and I hope it goes through and makes the people it’s meant for much happier.
