modernvintage:

x-cetra:

ignescent:

spacedandelions:

somethingaboutsomethingelse:

scienceoftheidiot:

hjarta:

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

They existed *before beetles*

Why is this sad? Why am I sad?

https://xkcd.com/1259/

Bee Orchid

Bee Orchid

xkcd

This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees’ range has shrunk by 90%.

(my own photos)

Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.

Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would’ve penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you’ve observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.

You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:

The Trees That Miss The Mammoths - American Forests

Trees that once depended on animals like the wooly mammoth for survival have managed to adapt and survive in the modern world.

American Forests



First quote from the linked article. Found it poetic.

(via desertowlet)

milf-adjacent:

(via thesnakesstuff)

drafthearse:

if you as a normal tumblr user go around flagging posts for mature labels you are A Fucking Cop

(via thesnakesstuff)

bogleech:

bogleech:

this is the teaser image and actual title of an upcoming horror movie, by a director who thinks cgi is overused and too fake looking already so it’s probably going to be pretty funny

This went from “funny meta joke” to actually top tier monster concept the moment I just learned that the gator is canonically made of bad cgi in-universe. It is created when laptops get dumped in the swamp. The characters will recognize that it is a CGI entity and it will presumably have powers and abilities in accordance with that.

(via desertowlet)

globuspolski:

i think it shld be more widespread for ppl to read aloud to each other as a means of spending time together. like even just a bunch of adults sitting together reading wikipedia articles or something

(via lenasai)

pitbolshevik:

pitbolshevik:

pitbolshevik:

warrior cats is so fucking funny because on the surface you’re like “alright. YA book about talking cats. that seems normal” but it is in fact not even a little bit normal

im not even talking about the graphic death scenes or the kittycat war crimes im talking about like how the tribe of rushing water (ironically one of the most racist and universally hated elements in the entire series) only exists because 9/11 happened

here’s more fucked up warrior cats lore.

(via darubyprincx)

transfantasma:

(via team-clockers)

homeboygirl:

learning that self depreciation isnt cool and just makes the people around you uncomfortable unironically improved my mental health a lot. like if you just stop saying negative shit about yourself you will genuinely like yourself more and other people wont be repulsed by your attitude and you will have more friends. it’s true.

(via abellark)

mostly-funnytwittertweets:

(via annaethchase)

pomegranate-belle:

radiojamming:

radiojamming:

radiojamming:

There was one of those hyperspecific polls that had an option like “your grandfather told you war stories that he never told anyone else” and now I feel like I have to tell the story about how a spider saved my grandpa’s life in WWII and how my family doesn’t kill spiders because we owe our existence to that One Single Spider

So to set the scene, it’s the height of WWII in France and my grandpa—a 6'3" 20 year old upper Michigan farm boy—has been separated from his company after their temporary camp was shelled. My grandpa (who, I have to add, was nicknamed ‘the Suicide Kid’ at this point because he worked in demolitions and bomb interception and kept taking the jobs no one wanted with the expectation that he was never going home anyway) is scared out of his wits, wandering around the French countryside alone. He has to move at night and sleep in barns and sheds during the day to hide from people who most definitely want him dead.

On one of these days, he finds a farmhouse of a very jittery couple who agree to let him sleep in the barn, with the conditions that he sleeps in the barn loft and if he’s found, they disavow all knowledge that he was there. He agrees, because he’s exhausted and will sleep in a hay pile if he has to. My grandpa manages to fit all six foot three inches of himself into a feed trough stored upstairs and tries to get some sleep.

However, right when he’s half-snoozing, he hears motors outside and sure enough, here are some very angry officers of mixed Nazi and Vichy make confronting the couple saying someone up the road spotted an American soldier walking this way. They wouldn’t know anything about that, would they? No, of course not.

All the while, my grandpa—now trying to figure out how to either escape the barn unseen or how to fight off six? seven? eight? people at once—freezes up and waits for the inevitable. While he does, a HUGE spider crawls next to his head and onto the loft railing. For one second, he thinks about swatting it away, but that would risk him being seen and killed.

So, instead, he lays there and waits to either fight to the death or get executed in a feed trough. And while he lays there, the spider starts making a huge web on the railing. My grandpa’s transfixed by this thing. He watches her go around and around, building a solid web before plopping herself off to one side and waiting for breakfast. At the same time, the officers finally go into the barn.

My grandpa can hear them searching around, turning over crates and checking animal pens. Then, he hears one say to check the loft.

And then another say, “Don’t bother. Look at the spiderwebs up there. No one’s been there in a while.”

And they leave.

Because my grandpa didn’t swat the spider away and let her build her web, the officers thought no one was there and left him alone. They drive off and my grandpa immediately thanks the farmer couple and hauls ass out of there as soon as he can.

After this, my grandpa refused to kill any spider, and his kids did the same. Because if it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t have lived and would never have had kids or grandkids. So we owe her one.

There’s the man himself. Go grandpa!!

[ID: Slightly grainy black and white photo cropped close to the head and shoulders of a smiling young man with dark curly hair. There are two other men in the photo, one on either side of him, who are mostly cropped out of the image. /End ID]

(via abellark)

eelhound:

“The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:

If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.

‘Those are the terms’, indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat’ or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!’), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away’ does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise’ is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away’ as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here’, the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away’ might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty.”

- Kurt Schiller, from “Omelas, Je T'aime.” Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.

(via annaethchase)

were–ralph:

were–ralph:

I thought this was a joke

that theory about him killing off the site for a tax writeoff seems legit actually

(via mallowmocha)

imaveryevilgirl:

STOP FLAGGING US FOR SAYING “TRANS”

(via orionis13)