Naamloos

[lawusstuffs]

[armadillo-arts]

hey so what if they had their engagement photoshoot on the beach where they met

[karolina-doodles]

“Being around you makes me do stupid things, and I wish it didn’t.”

“It’s okay, I do stupid things around you too, Amity.”

Happy pride everyone! 🥹🩷 Another year, another illustration to close off pride month - with Lumity being my chosen couple of the year 🙂‍↕️ the Owl House and Lumity have a special place in my heart, they bring out the softie in me damn 😭 I can’t WAIT for the graphic novel to be released this fall, I am in a Luz and Amity DROUGHT.

But in the meantime I hope this fanart makes you happy just as much as it made me happy drawing it 🥰 Prints will be available soon!

[blessphemy]

if you read about any biology you can quickly lose touch with what is astonishing and miraculous vs what is mundane, from animals that steal chloroplasts to become photosynthetic, to cloning technology being old hat, to trees that didn’t biodegrade for tens of millions of years, to naturally occurring lateral gene transfer between vastly different species, to the creation of gametes from adult cells, to the ability of some cancers to induce blood vessel growth, to desert shrimp that lie dormant for years, to the sensitivity of human touch receptors, to the fact that human hardware has a latent ability to see UV but their corneas block those wavelengths, to birds that echolocate and live in caves, to human skin being covered in enzymes that destroy RNA, to individual trees becoming genetic tapestries branch by branch, to life forms that gain energy from the electron potential of metals in their environments, to plants that recognize their siblings and adjust their behavior accordingly when growing next to them, to metamorphosis

which is to say. All of it is miraculous. and all of it is mundane. biology is Chaos vs. Order locking horns forever

[prokopetz]

You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.

[calloutnevvegas]

For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

Don’t fuck with flamingos

[revretch]

….. Didn’t know most of that

[iamthekaijuking]

Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.

[revretch]

Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.

American flamingos just drink that shit

[bogleech]

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

[assuming-dinosaur]

Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.

[voidvinn]

god I miss this show

[jetix]

2024-09-21

[edgebug]

"grace. grace! grace give attention. rocky perform human ritual of escape closet now. statement."

"come again?"

"i learn more from thinking machine. human gender preference. attraction to same gender, means word 'gay.' all eridian same gender." rocky stands straight up. "rocky come out to grace now. all rocky plural gay, statement."

"...wow, that's... rock, i'm not sure it makes much sense to apply human ideas of sexual orientation to a monogendered species."

a long and judgmental pause. then:

"grace HOMOPHOBIC, question????"

[turquoisespace35]

The face someone gets stabbed for

[grouphug33]

Eva and Grace’s dynamic is so important to me. They’re in love platonically. Like, that’s not a common dynamic. She put the way he likes his coffee into the ship’s computer. He follows her around like a puppy. In the book, she cracks jokes with him and him only. She cares about his opinion. He was the only one she asked about the coma gene, wondering if it was worth it.

He’s her best friend, and she doesn’t even know it. They’re so close, that in the book, people think they’re sleeping together, and poor Grace is so confused because he thought that was his platonic work wife, wdym people think we’re sleeping together, that’s my person that I crack jokes with and then she glares at me because they’re not funny.

She’s softer with him than anybody else and is only ever vulnerable around him. We see in the movie, he’s the only one who ever gets her to smile, and sometimes even laugh, and then she serenades all of them, but mainly him, and he stares at her with those big, shiny eyes so lovingly, and she points at him when she sings, “everything’s gonna be alright”, and then she gives him those eyes, so loving.

And then she’s trying to stop herself from crying when she’s sending him away because, against her will, he’s become her person, and somewhere along the way, she’s become his, and they will have forever ended this relationship on bad terms, and nothing can fix that.

It’s a platonic tragedy. It’s a platonic love story. This is something we don’t get often, or, like, ever, and it’s deep and it’s tragic and it’s sad.

But even after, Eva’s still taking care of him. Packing clothes she knew would bring him comfort. Programming the ship to know how he likes his coffee. And Grace is still watching out for her, speaking to her directly in his video logs, with that same lopsided smile he used to throw her way.

He uses Rocky’s sign for goodbye, and she uses it back, and how did this book and movie give us such a deep platonic friendship because, guys, this NEVER HAPPENS.

Eva and Grace, the platonic male/female friendship of all time.

[glitchedgirly]

See the thing about Stratt putting all media ever in the Hail Mary is that it isn’t just for lolz or to keep the crew entertained, it always struck me as something deeply sad. Because even if all the crew survived, there was no way they could consume all possible media ever, language barriers alone would present a problem. And even then, they had a job to do and focus on first (which could have theoretically taken decades of work to figure out) so they wouldn’t have much use for The Great Gatsby or a week’s worth of poorly written amateur Guatemalan experimental opera. Let us remember that Stratt is practical and true utilitarian Instead, I think it was another part of the Hail Mary. If the scientists failed, if the Earth died, then what? Everything would have been completely lost. Art, music, film, history. Destroyed. Without a single living soul to remember it by. It would be as if all of humanity had never existed.

But if it survived? If other alien civilizations discovered traces of humanity? Then the memory of mankind could live on and be remembered. What better way to do that than to send everything (literally everything, the art, the music, the science, the history) out as far as humanly possible so that it might connect with someone else in the universe? It would be a long shot, a Hail Mary, but it was the best chance that humanity had to be remembered

[turquoisespace35]

What if they were just tiny lil and pixelated?

[bjornasaurus]

Love

[byjove]

looking at pictures of rare animals not native to the region you live in really reminds you the world is vast and cool and there is a lot to love

[byjove]

the Pyrenean desman

[homunculus-argument]

We need to isolate and start selectively breeding the plastic eating bacteria so we can optimise their efficiency, and then somehow splice their DNA into the gut bacteria of an obligate carnivore, so we can put it in our cats gut biomes so they'll finally be free of having to choose between whether they want to eat plastic or whether they want to live.

[deoxyribonucleicacids]

As a geneticist and microbiologist who has worked with plastic-degrading microbes briefly, this is theoretically possible. The most difficult parts would be finding a microbe that could take plastic in it's unaltered (or slightly stomach-acid degraded) form.

For my project, we were trying to identify microbes that could use partially treated plastic as a food source and break it down further. The carbon bonds in our daily plastics are really hard to get at and break, hence the bad degradation, so breaking some of those bonds through heat and chemicals first can help microbes get access to them. Once we identify a microbe that can do this, we could test giving them slightly less degraded plastic to live on until they develop a way to eat it and go until they either get back to normal plastic or hit a wall where the microbe can't progress anymore (which may be likely).

An alternative approach to breeding (although you don't 'breed' most microbes since they reproduce asexually but instead find strains with mutations that lead to desired changes) would be trying to predict an enzyme that could break the bonds in plastic, engineering it, and putting it in microbes to test if it works. On one hand it could overcome any natural halt selection has but would be initially harder to discover.

The best solution would probably be to find the microbe that can eat the partially degraded plastic, figure out what enzyme is doing the work, then see how the enzyme could be improved to work through plastic in its default state.

Once you have that, the next consideration would be what byproducts are created from eating plastic? Part of the project was hoping that the microbe that could eat plastic would produce a useful byproduct that could be harvested, as an unfortunate reality of our current world is that if it's not profitable it probably won't take hold. But if we wish to put this in a living organism, we need to make sure it won't produce a harmful byproduct, or if it does, then ensuring the organism can quickly turn it harmless before it builds up.

Once all of that is figured out, the next hardest thing would be ensuring that whatever gut microbe you put the plastic eating gene in continues to express it. Since plastic is so hard to use it would probably prefer to use any glucose lying around first, and if that runs out then switch to eating plastic. We could try removing its ability to eat glucose (or whatever other compounds it lives off of), but then it would be less competitive in the gut environment and would require a steady source of plastic in order to not die off.

Although, I assume cats (and some people) would not find that a challenge.

[hussyknee]

The most basic, intractable fact about mental illnesses is that you simply cannot willpower your way out of them. The only exceptions to this rule are the ones I have, which continue to disable me due to lack of determination and other grave personal flaws

[sclappin]

How convenient it is to attach small, useful objects to your clothes at waist level

[2-way-monologues]

Ahhh love this!!

Also, petition to bring back chatelaines.

[sclappin]

No one can stop you! This is where my friend who is head of costuming for the museum I used to work at buys theirs for the site. (I am not sponsored by or affiliated with that shop, I've just worn their products in work contexts & also advocate for bringing chatelaines back).