In the Den

Hi, hey there, yo, hej da! FB has in the last hour flagged 12 of my posts as spam from today and yesterday (read: SINCE THE SELF QUARANTINES BEGAN!) I don’t know what the fuck they expected when people are trying to share information en masse and are locked up in their own spaces, but fucking hell. So if you notice a slight change of tone in my blog it’s because I’m sharing more stuff local to me as well as the usual animals and other stuff. 

[hornestoothgap]

T. Kingfisher - What Stalks the Deep

[shamansantics]

LOL

[labelleizzy]

[eriyu]

[mitchipedia]

[targetedknowledge]

[animentality]

[sosuperawesome]

Book Fore Edge Paintings // Maisie Matilda

[cosmeretrek]

Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.

[thebreakfastgenie]

I do actually care marginally about the guy in that reddit screenshot who voted for Trump and is now worried that he might lose his medicaid funding because I did not fucking stutter when I said healthcare is a human right but the people losing their internships and job offers to the hiring freeze are straight up hilarious.

[sprinkledsalt]

My mom was telling me about this YouTube video she watched (I can't remember the name, sorry) where the person shared a screenshot of some MAGA voter from Florida asking for help, because his wife had been hired for a nursing job with the VA in Texas, so they sold their house and were preparing to move. But they rescinded her job offer after Trump's executive order. The post from the guy was basically like "I already contacted Senator Ted Cruz's office, and they said they couldn't do anything about this. Please help me get this story to President Trump, we love him! We voted for him 3 times! And we know this was just a mistake and he'd help us!"

Just.................a part of me laughs, and another part of me thinks about how cult followers genuinely believe that the cult leader cares about them

[kalessinsdaughter]

This is the part about believing in universal human rights that can be a bit difficult: they're universal, and should never be denied anyone, no matter who they are or what they have done.

You can be – you should be – furious with people who voted for Trump, for wilfully trying to sabotage those rights and make them conditional, a privilege for the "deserving", a privilege they can deny the "wrong" kind of people.

And when the MAGA crowd are hit by the consequences of their actions, and denied basic human rights because it turns out their Great Leader doesn't actually include his followers among the privileged, it's tempting to say that they deserve to be denied those rights, because that's what they wanted to do to others.

But if you do that, you don't truly believe that those rights should be universal; you just have a different idea than the MAGA crowd about who should be included among the privileged.

You can still tell the MAGA who's crying that the leopards ate their face that you're angry with them for letting the face-eating leopards loose. But you shouldn't be fine with their face being eaten.

[delvinanaris]

The key here, IMO, is the distinction between your emotional reaction to hearing about it and how you consciously believe people should be treated.

Having a positive emotional reaction, enjoying the schadenfreude or whatever, doesn’t mean you’re bad and isn’t something you need to suppress. You just need to also be able to say, “but that shouldn’t happen, not to them, not to anyone.”

[thebreakfastgenie]

This is a good articulation! I'm going to reblog this addition because I think it might be helpful for some people who are sorting out their feelings to see this stated so plainly!

[beardedmrbean]

[taken-aurally]

It feels criminal not to include the third panel

[shanastoryteller]

wish there was a non rude way to be like “I understand your criticism, I don’t even necessarily disagree with it, but I am doing these things on purpose, because I like them and I want to, and therefore your opinion has no value, because you might think me painting a room entirely pink is tacky, but I did it on purpose”

[unyanizedcatboys]

[byjove]

I doubt any of my followers are future homebuyers but please note that the landlord special/millennial beige renovation is often used to cover up serious issues with structural integrity like wood rot, water damage, termites and mold. The thick ass layer of paint makes the place look bright and new and covers up smells but (especially in older houses, though newer houses are not immune, housing bubble suburban hellscapes are often structural nightmares) it can be a deceptive trick to hide the $80k+ worth of work the place really needs. New super thick paint jobs can be an indication something is very wrong. Make sure you get any house you’re thinking of buying and moving into inspected thoroughly so you don’t waste your life savings and get stuck in a mold infested hellscape you cannot resell or fix.

[byjove]

You know, also be on the look out for this in rentals. Sometimes they don’t just lather everything in paint for cosmetic purposes. Sometimes that stunningly bright white wall is on the verge of crumbling into dust at the slightest touch.

[viralfrog]

[nerd-bastard]

#two senseis of different forms meeting in a forest and exchanging weapons in a show of trust and respect for the others mastery

[sandmandaddy69]

[arwwenn-blog]

“But where our hearts truly lie is in peace and quiet and good, tilled earth. For all Hobbits share a love of things that grow.”

[foxsmoulder]

Story time:

So in Jr high we had some free time in class. It was the end of term or a holiday the next day or something, and we were in the theater for some reason. So the teacher decided we’d have a paper airplane flying contest. Whoever got theirs to fly the farthest won.

Everyone went about folding, all a little different but basically the same 2 designs. And then there was the one kid, the kid who had a piece of rope for a belt for most of the year, who got free breakfast at school because he didn’t get one at home. Anyway, he confirmed the goal and set about folding the absolute most pieces of paper possible into some semblance of a plane.

Time was up, everyone stood at the edge of the stage and did their darnedest to gently float their planes with just enough push and finesse to make them go farthest.

And then there’s the kid I mentioned. He went up to the edge and whipped that wad of frankenplane as hard as he could. The thing flew across the auditorium and smacked into the back wall, paper flying everywhere like the feathers of a goose sucked into a jet engine.

No doubt, his went the farthest by far.

Just something I think about.

[blastdamage]

the paris catacombs are 1000x more fucked up than i imagined

[blastdamage]

did you know the cops once found a fully functioning movie theater with a well-stocked bar inside the catacombs and they when they tried to go back later to formally investigate it was completely emptied out save for a note that read "don't search for us"

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

Underground french cinema

[vaporevon]

im a lil high and i have cilantro soap questions

if cilantro tastes like soap to some people why is it such an uncommon soap scent? I feel like things that taste like soap should be soap

before soap existed what did the soap gene cavemen say cilantrussy. hang on i have to stop this mid sentence because my phone autocorrected cilantro to cilantrussy which means i have previously typed that word out enough for my phone to think it’s a word and more of a word than cilantro. i have some inward reflection to do.

[medusinestories]

Okay so this is what I know. The only gene they've isolated so far in people repulsed by cilantro is a gene that makes people hypersensitive to aldehydes, a chemical compound frequently found in perfumery.

So "tastes like soap" could mean that cilantro tastes like the smell of aldehydes used in the fragrance of some soaps. Fragrances often have dozens of ingredients, and people with aldehyde sensitivity are more likely to notice this part of the soap fragrance.

Perhaps people who like cilantro don't smell cilantro in soap because they don't have the gene that allows them to pick that smell out in a (complex) soap fragrance.

However. Cilantro doesn't taste like soap to everyone who has the gene.

To me, cilantro tastes like bugs.

Specifically, it tastes the way stinkbugs smell when you startle or crush them. (wiki describes their smell as "oily, dusty, woody and earthy, and like coriander" which is another word for cilantro)

And the reason these bugs smell/taste bad is because they use similar aldehydes to cilantro to make a "don't eat me I'm poisonous" scent that will repulse predators.

So for question 2, cavemen didn't have soap, but they did have stinky bugs and having a gene that would help you sniff them out could be helpful. So I guess cilantro smelled like bugs to cavemen. Now that we use aldehydes in soap, it smells like soap.

BTW you can apparently train your brain to like cilantro by eating it more frequently and associating it with pleasant dishes. I haven't tried this yet though. Because... bugs.

[anaryllis]

im sure someone else has mentioned this in the tags also, but the etymology of coriander, ancient greek koriannon (i think), is a combo of the words for "bed-bug" and "fragrant anise" so like. ancient greeks didnt say it smelled like soap, they said it smelled like herbal bugs. which. yeah. exactly. cavemen presumably said similarly

[antifa-furry-soldier]

I love getting so much interesting info on a post that also has the word "cilantrussy"