dirt enthusiast
$LAYYYTER
Love Begins
@theartofmadeline
RMH
titsay
taylor price
Keni
Not today Justin
No title available
art blog(derogatory)
⁂
Xuebing Du
we're not kids anymore.
almost home
DEAR READER
Claire Keane
styofa doing anything
wallacepolsom
No title available
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Uruguay
seen from Spain
seen from Japan
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from Spain
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Japan
@adhoption
As a trans woman I can confirm that they indeed found an ancient forest inside a 630ft deep sinkhole in China
cis people can reblog this but keep it on subject, please
Happy pride month everyone always remember that the sinkhole has an ecosystem large enough to house not only insects but likely several species of small birds or mammals
‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.
It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”
This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.
Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’
-Ed Yong, An Immense World
Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.
I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.
It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.
I'm finally watching a lot of old classic rom coms and wow, Nora Ephron really didn't like her romantic leads to be single. she saw Meg Ryan or whoever (Meg Ryan) and thought: you know what will make audiences root for her to get with the male lead more? put her in a loving relationship.
let's have her be flirting with this guy behind her devoted partner's back, then dump him for the new guy she barely knows right at the end of the film, and have him be completely fine with it. that'll exonerate her behaviour. and we'll believe that the new relationship is now a happily ever after and she isn't liable to do the same thing again.
the weirdest thing is that it's not even central to the plot. it's not the USP. you could tell these stories with her single, having just got out of a break-up or, if you insist on a touch of infidelity, even with a partner who is horrible to her. but for some reason she loves to make it so that I don't root for the new romance. that I don't care that they get together. she actually changed Sleepless in Seattle to make that the case. just out of pure love of the game.
anyway, the GOT/LOTR discourse.
a recent article captured a point poorly:
this saw a lot of people responding as follows:
this is a weak repetition of a common point in this discourse, which always meets the same response.
I saw a recent interview with GRRM where he said the following:
and cue the same responses:
it's frustrating because nobody trotting out this response seems to understand what the original point is saying.
if someone says 'lotr has absolute evil', responding 'nope, x was just tempted by the ring' is not an answer. we aren't talking about boromir or gollum or whoever. we're talking about the ring itself. about sauron. that's what people mean when they say there is absolute good and bad. you have the embodiment of absolute evil in the room at the time. the fact it impacts other people and corrupts them into its evil is secondary.
first off, please admit that there is absolute evil here, which is what this point are saying. the point is that the bad guy is just bad full stop. this means sauron, not denethor or whoever. this is what they are talking about. you don't get to see inside the head of an orc or haradrin or nazgul or whatever and think these are people with their own motivations. 99% of the bad guys just exist in the plot to be bad guys. you have to accept that.
then you have the good guys, who are broadly good and heroic (where not corrupted by easily identified external evil), and are shown as such because they fight the inherently bad guys so that good can vanquish over evil. that is a certain kind of story. I need you to admit that.
the fact you then establish e.g. characters are by default good but impacted by external absolute evil which corrupts them also does not given much in terms of complexity. if the pure evil villain is just making them more evil by using his external evil powers, that's not a morally grey character. that's not a dilemma, it's a battle. against external evil. just like the ones with the swords.
once you've established the existence of pure evil, it's easy to write what good looks like. a character is good because they stand up to evil. they can be a hero. when you don't have that clear cut bad guy, you have to think about what good looks like, what decisions do they make, how do they treat their enemies etc. that's a very different kind of story. that's what GRRM's on about.
the LOTR vs GOT comparison discourse has not progressed much in terms of content over the years, but it's interesting in terms of how it is politically cast.
when GOT was first released it was seen as grimdark for dudebros who liked gritty realism, because life isn't fair, and not for people who didn't like sexual assault used to make that point. LOTR was this pure-hearted story about friendship and the much nicer liberal fantasy.
now these arguments are all LOTR from the RETVRN crowd, depicting GRRM as the virgin worrying about cowardice in men's hearts and JRRT as the chad believing in strong white male heroes, right and wrong, Christian values, national pride against the invading hordes etc. whereas GRRM has the opposite modernist messages.
this has possibly been coloured by GRRM's own liberal political views becoming more widely known, but it also says something about how we have moved as a society. to use one axis it feels like we have gone from 'GOT is problematic because female characters get assaulted' to 'GOT is woke because it has female characters'. the bar has been lowered to that extent.
that last point isn't really an exaggeration. following the release of Project Hail Mary, I saw people commenting on how Andy Weir's middle book was skipped, noting the protagonist was a Muslim woman, and it shocked me.
not to go all Britta Perry meme, but honestly I expected the Islamophobia. I anticipated their reaction that this is woke signalling etc. I did not expect they were upset simply because character was a woman. but that was what the comments said. refusing to read or listen to a woman, flat-out. saying they hate having to listen to bitches narrating. they had femoid protagonists dictating to them. that was a deal-breaker. I did not realise we were still unable to accept women as people in big 2026.
shortly after that, I saw orson scott card did a post about writing where he gave an example and referred to a hypothetical character as 'she', and again these were the sort of responses. then there was a mooted film with a female lead, and there they were again. not buried, but some of the most popular replies. possibly promoted by the algorithm. just utterly hostile to the existence of women. not to a minority, as we have sadly come to expect, but to half of the population, people they must surely interact with. how do you get past that? how do you reach these people?
the Other Site is now so right-wing that you get people mocking female-coded interests or dunking on the met gala for being this playground for the metropolitan liberal elite, as you would expect, and then people come to argue against them by pointing out that it's White, and therefore Good Actually. this is now accepted currency.
watching Project Hail Mary and Stranger Things recently and in both cases being able to suspend disbelief for a lot of things but stumbling over the depiction of language barriers. characters love to stop and ask for the definition of certain dialogue-friendly words whilst having heard many far more obscure ones without blinking. there is no way you covered those ones first.
I'm sick of depictions of historical figures with hollywood noses, we need more normal looking people and more unusual looking people on our screens. although finn wolfhard can be king james vii in the glorious revolution tv show.
Check out this website I found while I was researching where to buy a giant toothbrush
GreatBigStuff is a brand name and registered trademark associated with and describes a unique line of products that are oversized replicas o
These are my favorite products
goddamn it I was trying to find a music video for a song in Spanish that came out 5+ years ago involving an astronaut who dies and it ends with his girlfriend going to the crash site and he's a ghost but Google thought I wanted to write a fuckin' song
this was the one! finally remembered it had "conmigo" in the title, AI was absolutely no help at all in finding it and nor was tumblr blog search of course
Sometime in 2020, Miranda was infected with COVID-19 which eventually led to paralysis as a result of peripheral neuropathy. His health severely deteriorated and eventually led to Encephalitis.
oh damn he's doing it tough
Chyno Miranda has successfully returned to music with Nacho, releasing their new album Radio Venezuela in April 2026, marking a significant comeback. The duo discussed overcoming difficult personal and health challenges to reunite, emphasizing a positive focus on their musical legacy.
and he's doing it better!
although I can still only find his video by searching for my own post talking about how I can't find his video 🤷
no I'm pretty sure I know what freshwater means
saw an ad where a guy had an old poor resolution picture of his grandmother and fed it into AI to get a crisp image where AI had sharpened it by filling in the blanks and therefore generating a smooth AI woman instead. he put it in a frame in his home and it became to final record of what she actually looked like. the ad promoted doing that for all your old photos. just replace your parents with AI generated faces until you convince yourself that was exactly how you remember them. we are lining up for what we would have read as dystopia just a decade ago.
the problem with having all the anxiety all of the time is that you get so used to pushing through, doing it scared, that you no longer know what is actually dangerous. you lose your natural sense of risk, because your body is crying wolf all of the time. should I close my eyes and send this email, or is the fear of it blowing up in my face actually real this time? nobody knows.
let the chips fall where they may
- seagull saying
every few months there seems to be another article about a potential jon snow tv show and it has never made sense to me that they would even consider it. surely there is no appetite for a show about jon snow wandering around north of the wall being sad and alone.
they already made that show, it was called game of thrones, and he had a whole plot arc there which explored pretty much everything it could and then ended. we already know what miserable cold lonely jon would look like. it would actually be more interesting to send him on holiday to the free cities and have him warm and relaxed for a change.
we are done with the far north. the weird cannibal thenn depiction ruined the prospect of exploring their culture in a spin-off, and ruined the contrast of skagos at the same time, which were possibly the two big things they could have gone into. otherwise we've seen it, done it, got the furs. we can just rewatch his s1 scenes if we want to see him shivering glumly again.
the only option is to wait 30 years then do old man jon and have a kid show up needing his help to bring him back to the world. people love their lone wolf and puppy combos. but then you're just doing the second fitz farseer trilogy, and may as well just adapt those books intead.
weekly episode releases not only fight the culture of impatient instant gratification low attention span bingeable content (as displayed when people throw their toys out of the pram on having to wait a week), not only push people to watch things at the same time and give them space to discuss between episodes, but also do the important job of giving you something to look forward to. having little treats in the near future is an important part of making my life liveable, to keep me pressing onwards, like a cat following a trail of treats on the floor. it's nice to be able to look ahead and see good news on the horizon. anticipation is half of the pleasure etc. but again and again and again.
it's classic action hero behaviour to slaughter all the hired guards (sometimes just regular security just doing their jobs) on the way to reaching the actual evil guy, but then dramatically decide to leave him alive out of mercy or respect for the justice system or whatever. they love to do it!
villain: kill me. do it. you know you want to.
hero: no... I can't... then would be just like you
the 50 goons they killed on the way in:
