Sometimes I share inspiring words and think very seriously on super important topics. Sometimes I share ridiculous humor and think way too seriously on silly pop culture.
Jadzia Dax, more alien-looking alien edition! Amphibious Trill: It Just Makes Sense. (Also, I already have a soft spot for salamander people.)
her belly is translucent, like a tadpole’s! You can see Dax curled up in there. Honestly, if you have a character with a symbiotic creature in their body and you don’t make it at least a little weird, what are you even doing?
having anxiety is like being given permanent unwanted custody of a halter arabian. like okay buddy is it panic time again. cool you probably need more exercise and an apple and then maybe you'll calm down.
taking my stupid walks for my stupid mental health with my stupid hypervigilant brain horse
thoroughly enjoying the notes on this post because it's equal parts people with anxiety going "yeah that's what it's like" and people with arabians going "yeah that's what they're like"
OP, please. This is… Not how you bracket a tournament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_(sports)
today my wisdom is: the ecological crisis of our planet is not a thing that will Suddenly destroy us sometime in the next century—it has taken decades of continuous work for our biosphere to be preserved thus far, and it will take decades more of continuous work to continue preserving it.
The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."
Things will continue to steadily get worse without steady action, but "augh! it's already too late to stop climate change and mass extinctions!" is specifically the worst response
what I mean is, there is a persistent fallacy that the present situation of a thing is always worse than the past, even if there have been fluctuations in badness.
This is not true. There is a great wealth of specific cases where ecosystems/species/a specific anthropogenic impact on the environment is CURRENTLY, RIGHT NOW, better than it has been at any point in the past 100 years
I've been researching the history of conservation in the USA...and I think current doomers would benefit from knowing just how bad things got throughout the 20th century.
The eastern USA's natural environments were fucking razed. We went scorched earth on everything.
In the 1930's, DEER and WILD TURKEYS were almost eliminated from my state. Deer. Wild turkeys. Common animals that you can see all the time.
I've seen animals close to my home that a person in the 1970's would not have been able to see. I saw river otters and a bald eagle a couple months ago! Farmer family friend remembers when a bald eagle sighting here made the news. There is a thriving population of elk (16,000 animals) in the Appalachian Mountains, for the first time since before 1850!
We actively tried to exterminate so many species. Bison. Wolves. Mountain lions. The US GOVERNMENT PAID PEOPLE TO KILL CARNIVORES. They're still here. They're reclaiming their old territories. All is not lost
There was a time most American cities almost never saw a blue sky. Brown and yellow smog was the norm and rivers were garbage sludge that are now teeming with fish. People don't know that government environmental regulation actually did succeed, that the EPA really worked as intended. Now it gets eroded because people think it isn't making a big difference, and they think that because they haven't seen what it's still holding back.
GERARD DUBOIS
Moby Dick
this is legendary because you as you go you see the photo itself and you’re “oh this is some symbolic / surrealist art” and then the TITLE hits you like a shotgun shell
In case you were unaware, Moby Dick is one of the foundational texts of cosmic horror. The White Whale is a god, maybe even The God. And Ahab Hates Him.
character sheet for @missgraceless as a gift for their friend, introducing Sinder the dragon born bard!
I love 70s-90s scifi. People fighting to retrieve AI programs on floppy disks. Passing around complicated computer programs on magnetic tape. Sending each other faxes between FTL spaceships. It's the best.
Sneakernet was/is a real thing and I love that even then they affixed and extropolated on it in the scifi realm. Here's one of my favorite quotes on the whole thing:
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." — Andrew S. Tannenbaum
Sneakernet is VERY MUCH still a real thing. Truly massive file transfers do *not* go over the internet; it would take too much time and too much bandwidth cost. People carry around briefcases full of hard drives. Sometimes they’re handcuffed to the courier, like in a spy movie.
(I was involved in one of those once. I was working at a video streaming company. We needed to get a load of masters from a new studio partner. It would have been like a 6 week file transfer even over fancy-ass corporate broadbband and we were launching in two. So my coworker flew California ↔ Europe round trip without leaving the airport over there, and they really, truly did handcuff the damn things to him because they were millions of dollars worth of IP.)
Hell, Amazon Web Services will send you a whole datacenter worth of hard drives built into an 18 wheeler with a fiber optic connector to get really massive data dumps into their archiving service.
Jewel beetle, Anthaxia candens, Buprestidae
Photographed in France by Frank Deschandol // Instagram
Photos shared with permission; do not remove credit or re-post!
