The Witch's Cauldron

Witchblr with a side of random fandom things

[valtsv]

oh my god i almost forgot to tell you all about how, while my dad was visiting, i had an infestation of every single kind of bug in my house that hasn't been a problem before or since. like i'm not kidding i evicted so many creeping crawlies that week and couldn't for the life of me stop mosquitos from stealing my blood, but as soon as he left they vanished. and i mean, sure, there's a perfectly rational explanation, because two people make more mess than one and he has a habit of leaving the windows wide open enough to fly a jet engine through day and night, but i can't help but think how symbolically on the nose it was. the ancestral rot at the heart of my family so gothic it's got ants and flies buzzing around its decaying corpse.

[valtsv]

hey so update but i haven't been harassed by a single freaky little beast since my dad left even after leaving some crumbs on the floor as an experiment to see if they attracted any ants so i think my dad might just be bugs actually

[quinnntessins]

@entities-of-posts textbook corruption example lol

[entities-of-posts]

Seconded

[acti-veg]

‘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

[namu-the-orca]

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.

[lavenderprose]

I love how some fics are called shit like "They Only Shoot The Birds Who Cannot Sing" and it's like the most insane porn you're ever read and then some fics are called Spit On Me and it's 18,000 words of the most achingly id-scratching prose you've ever read and they're both. They're both so fucking good. thank God for fanfiction.

[achillesinhighheels]

[mechanicalhandsyaoi]

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

it really is crazy that women's clothes don't fit anybody. fat women can't find clothes, skinny women can't find clothes, tall women can't find clothes, short women can't find clothes, big chested women can't find clothes, small chested women can't find clothes. who the fuck are these being made for

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

we all really resonated with this one huh

[cattraine]

As near as I can tell they’re all just designed to hang on hangers.

[kuromi-hoemie]

hey um. so sorry to tell you this, but op of that post plays toys kinda weird. yeah you should just block them, that's not how normal people play with toys

[kuromi-hoemie]

this is what shipping discourse sounds like to me

[darthlenaplant]

[thewitchway]

Dont go to THAT pretend tea party - that girl serves weird air.

[xiaq]

One of the best things about being a writer is thinking of something small you can add to your work that’s just. Devastating. Like you’re sitting there going. Oh. That would be diabolical. People would get really riled up about that. Exquisite. Let’s do it.

[yviisxo]

rest in peace to this diva

[97642]

[insertusernameici]

[unicornempire]

I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.

[theheroheart]

#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)

[jack-the-bear]

Leverage hands down has the best character development I’ve ever seen.

[lets-go-steal-an-ot3]

This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).

But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.

Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.

[gay-jesus-probably]

Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.

Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.

[mikkeneko]

A charity where you can do this, right here.

Be Parker! Be somebody else’s Leverage!

[melyzard]

Reblogging for the website.

[nianeyna]

yes! if you want to help with the medical debt crisis in the US and have some extra money please donate to RIP Medical Debt if you can. They’re completely legit and really do what they say - you really CAN relieve an incredible amount of debt for the needy with even a small donation. I’m a monthly donor and receive a quarterly report of the debt they’ve abolished, and it truly is amazing. Based on those reports the average amount of debt abolished per person is actually I would say about $600 - which means, if you’re doing the math, that with a $6 donation to RIP Medical Debt, you can potentially pull one person out of a poverty spiral - maybe even one family. For six dollars. that’s a pretty good deal, I think.

[bethanyactually]

RIP Medical Debt is now called Undue Medical Debt!

Undue Medical Debt Homepage

Undue Medical Debt makes it easy for donors to make an impactful difference in the lives of those struggling with medical debt.

[the-supernatural-atheist]

if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills

[the-supernatural-atheist]

where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*

[makaeru]

I hate learning about instances of "oh yeah we know how to do that, we just don't".

[sztupy]

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previou

[ayeforscotland]

Let’s fucking go

[thebibliocat]

from the key points section:

"A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in its AI-generated search overviews."

"The court treated the AI overviews as Google's own content and rejected Google's argument that users were responsible for fact-checking the results themselves."

It's an interesting article that explains why the German court disagreed with Google's shitty "it's the user's responsibility!" arguments and goes a bit into accuracy and free speech protections.

[dawn4ngel]

[bbcwhereareyou]

[punchholesinthesky]

[thundergrace]

WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS MY FAVORITE TELEVISION SERIES OF ALL TIME (it's not out yet)

[cryoverkiltmilk]

📝

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

Oh, I am in.

[dduane]

WANT. :)

[catbellybuttons]

writing the first half of a fic: yaaaay! wooo!!! 🌈💝 fun ideas 😊💖✨️~

writing the second half of a fic: I am in a fight with god himself and he is winning

[fairycosmos]

apparently youre supposed to perform. they love it when you perform. but it has to be authentic. they hate it when it's not authentic. but you have to perform.

[vamptits]

it's just really apparent that people think it's okay to want pain but morally abhorrent to want to give it. sorry but the sadist gets to have fun too. it's actually pretty crucial to the process.

[vamptits]

if I said I was going to a taekwondo class would you feel the need to tell me kicking people on the street is bad or.

[whoopsie-collective]

Image ID: A screenshot of a tumblr comment that says "yeah, its only abhorrent imo, when the recipient is non consenting, i've" the screenshot cuts off.

[dogspouse]

[aq2003]

i can't get over this. this is fucking killing me

[evtrained]

The Star Trek race is in one episode, but has an extensive backstory in beta canon where they're a race of three-foot-tall two-headed lizards. If you wanna read it you have to find a paperback from 1978.

The Star Wars alien has an extensive backstory on the wiki that nobody ever alludes to in canon and like three people have read. It's still weirdly racist.

The Doctor Who alien languishes in its paper-thin form for thirty years before someone brings it back for an emotional tour-de-force that leaves the audience in tears. It's still a toaster.