A bit obsessively

Some of this, some of that. Author & librarian.

[crowboy-bebop]

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

source: hellgate osprey cam

[curlicuecal]

[aetherograph]

More context:

the first osprey is the father, the one that comes later is the mother.

ospreys are not eagles, they're ospreys

ospreys only eat fish, that's why they don't register this starling as possible food

the starling got home safely

the starling was not trying to eat the eggs, it was mostly curious and you can see it trying to hop under the osprey every time the osprey tries to sit down again--this is because the starling is still a baby and has the instinct to get under an adult for warmth, even though it mostly has its feathers. this scares the osprey because that is a Foreign Creature near its eggs.

at the end of the video you can see the ospreys starting to turn the eggs. birds do this so the yolk and/or embryo don't stick to the shell of the egg, which is bad for the egg's health.

ospreys have eyes adapted to seeing beneath the surface of the water!

[a-bit-obsessively]

The best thing I bought in Rome was this tote bag with Antinous. 🤩

I might have gone a little crazy in the very small shop in Trastevere when I realized they had postcards, a pin AND a bag with his image. Lol, I bought all three.

But the young girl in the store didn’t seem to know who he was, she simply called him “the Roman head”. And I didn’t say “well actually…” OR “I wrote a book about him!” I just payed and was happy.

[the1920sinpictures]

1920s Florence Mills, American singer and dancer. From Pinterest.

[markovchaingang]

my lord. the two statues you commissioned are finally complete. yeah, the double-order with the vast and trunkless legs of stone and the shattered visage. i like to think we captured the sneer of cold command pretty well. it's a really thought-provoking piece my lord. very deconstructionist. i'm sure that even a traveller a thousand years from now could take one look at it and instantly recognise it must have come from an artistically enlightened culture

[omtai]

Does anyone care if the boulder is happy does anyone imagine the boulder to be happy? Or is everything about that other guy

[crownkeeper]

before there were blorbos there were little meow meows and before there were little meow meows there were cinnamon rolls

[a-bit-obsessively]

In Campagnano di Roma. We game out from our hostel for an evening walk but it looked like we interrupted some kind of meeting.

[a-bit-obsessively]

Our cats: Sonja (the dark tabby) and Svante. Siblings, six years old in September. Living their best life. (Yes he’s on the washing machine).

[thevulturesquadron]

text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]

[rudjedet]

And they're absolutely specifically pushing it, make no mistake. It's not just a matter of "it's there, it's convenient, so people are going to take the path of the least resistance", it is a legitimate and concerted effort on the part of these companies to get people to outsource all these things to their models.

They're preying on insecurities to do it. Yes, you can write an essay - but can you write a good essay, they ask you. Do you not want to improve your output? Do you not want people to think of you as competent and very clever? Why go through the mortifying process of failing and failing and failing until you succeed if you can just skip the "learning" part of doing, and simply generate a ready-made product?

I'm preaching to the choir here obviously but it's a concerning thing to witness nonetheless. My kid is 6 next week and I've been teaching her that failing at things is morally neutral and in fact necessary even before the advent of AI, but it's becoming ever more important that we teach the kids that criticism and failure and discomfort aren't necessarily bad things, but just a part of the growth process.

AI companies are heavily invested in making themselves relevant. They want people to believe they can't do the things they have done unaided before and to make them become reliant on the AI models, so the AI models' existence is artificially justified.

[a-bit-obsessively]

Yes. Yes!

[oh-good]

Young Cathy and Heathcliff find a half staved unconscious Jane Eyre on the moors and poked her with a stick to see if she's dead. She isn't roused by their proding and they don't care enough to try and help her so it isn't mentioned in either book.

[petrarchesco]

it's one of those days where I browse through the vatican De Arte Venandi cum Avibus manuscript and dream about how I'd dress if I didn't care about anything ever

[publicdomainreview]

Waterfall and Northern Lights, Carl Svante Hallbeck, 1856. ⁠ ⁠ Chromolithograph depicting Harsprånget waterfall, now the site of the largest hydroelectric power station in Sweden.⁠ ⁠ One of several aurora borealis prints available in our online shop: https://publicdomainreview.org/shop/fine-art-prints/subject/aurora-borealis

[a-bit-obsessively]

I’ve been there! But this is what it looks like now, mostly.

[manicpixiedckgirl]

[theaudientvoid]

There are multiple chapters that are set in hospitals where the characters are attempting to recover from injuries that never fully heal. I must once again stress that my experience in WWI was perfectly normal.

[aro-ace-from-outer-space22]

There is a giant horrible mudplain full of unrecoverable and perfectly preserved dead bodies that the characters have to walk through in a land where the air is poisoned gas, and on a compLETELY UNRELATED NOTE: WWI WAS TOTALLY FINE AND NORMAL!!

[english-history-trip]

[scorchroots]

I've never loved anyone as much as I love Ursula Le Guin

[a-bit-obsessively]

Pictures from the church Madonna del parto in Sutri, Italy. Once a Roman Mithraeum, and before that Etruscan graves. A fascinating place, a cave behind a door, dimmed lights and these beautiful frescoes from the 13th-14th century. I LOVE the little pilgrims in hats in the first image.

[quasi-normalcy]

I've reached the point where cynicism is a major turn-off for me. You're not smarter than idealists, and you're not helping.

[quasi-normalcy]

Funny that the stereotypical cynic is an idealist who aged out of it. In my experience, the reverse is true. I was an extreme cynic as a teenager and then I noticed how profoundly limiting it was, and also that "cynics are cool and smart" was a message that was being constantly reinforced by corporate media for some reason.

[quasi-normalcy]

#yes! cynicism reads as very juvenile to me#and yes prev often stemming from teen pain

Yeah, like I see black-pilled people on here and my default reaction isn't "oh, these must be world-weary old warriors who've lost their faith in humanity", it's "these people are in their 20s and need a hobby"

[quasi-normalcy]

I also think that the present era has proven that authoritarian leaders don't actually want a population of wide-eyed idealists, they want a population of jaded assholes who are convinced that everyone is lying, any resistance is either a scam or doomed to failure, and nothing can ever get better.

[rudjedet]

*grabs tumblr by the face* hey, hey look at me. whatever you do, we are NOT pivoting to "well Hatshepsut COULD be trans because she never said she WASN’T" after we spent years undoing the whole thing where people shoehorn modern gender frameworks into the perception of ancient historical figures whose culture didn't have this framework. we are NOT going to use "don't put words in the ancients' mouths" as an excuse to say "it could still be true because she never said it was false". Hatshepsut - and before her several other female kings like Sobekneferu and Tawosret - only referred to herself with masculine pronouns when she grammatically had to, while she used feminine pronouns everywhere else she could, indicating that she likely didn’t consider herself as anything other than a woman per the ancient Egyptian constructs of such.