Polyamory is safe for work. Polyamory is safe for kids. Polyamory is safe for day time tv. Polyamory isn’t more sexual than any other relationship and it can be just as romantic, sweet, and healthy.
Aggressively reblogs.

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oozey mess

ellievsbear
One Nice Bug Per Day

Andulka
trying on a metaphor
Today's Document

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RMH
noise dept.
cherry valley forever
will byers stan first human second
d e v o n
DEAR READER
we're not kids anymore.
occasionally subtle
taylor price
art blog(derogatory)
styofa doing anything

JBB: An Artblog!
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@incredibleflimsycat
Polyamory is safe for work. Polyamory is safe for kids. Polyamory is safe for day time tv. Polyamory isn’t more sexual than any other relationship and it can be just as romantic, sweet, and healthy.
Aggressively reblogs.
Me: Fuck, the paper towels I want are on the top shelf.
The Sir David Attenborough That Lives In My Brain: Being smaller-than-average presents an added challenge to foraging ... but necessity is the mother of invention. A little creativity turns a baguette into a tool, and voilà--
(paper towel roll falls on my face)
Sir David Attenborough, pleasantly: Success.
10000 YEAR OLD ROCK ART OF GIRAFFES FOUND IN LIBYA LET'S GO
YES!!!!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
of note: 95% of libya is desert, and giraffes are not found there! but this predates not just the libyan desert, but the entire sahara desert it's a part of! giraffes aren't found there any more and this is a memory of a time when things were giraffier
also apparently this rock art dates across multiple periods spanning thousands of years? but i couldn't find much detail on that so i can't give specifics
but yeah, this isn't just a memory of giraffes, but of giraffes now absent encountered by people just 2000 years (the difference between the late roman republic and today) out of the ice age, in a climate unfamiliar to any of the hundred billion people born since the desertification of the sahara drove the ancient egyptians to the nile, near the start of the agricultural revolution
the time between this and the birth of the sahara was nearly as long as the time between the birth of the sahara and now, in which all recorded history is contained, and all languages we can recognise at all - the language and culture of these people would be totally alien to current libyans, twice the difference between the oldest european language and english, predating all but libya's mountains!
and we have pictures of giraffes of the time! what a beautiful gift from such a distant past
Giraffiti
When I was at the natural history museum, the fossil section had stickers on the glass to engage children - things like "Flap your arms like a pterodactyl" or "Measure your hand against the mosasaurus." However the first of these I encountered, which I found alarming and threatening without context, was a sticker reading "Struggle like you are stuck in a tar pit"
I feel like more bright colors, an exclamation mark, or a more whimsical font choice would've also helped here to indicate that it is a Fun Activity For Children. Instead it felt like getting instructed in my inevitable fate by a road sign
when god closes a door you reach your little paws under it and go mrrwwaaaooow mmreeaaow
Imagine if a like 8 foot tall guy that looked kinda like an alien species just kinda showed up at the house you rent a room in and crashed on the couch and at first everyone hated him but you kinda just accepted this weird massive kinda-human alien species thing as a part of your group even though he's like twice the size of everyone else there
Cuz that's literally happening to sea lions in San Francisco right now
So there's two species of sea lion in North America: the California sea lion, ranging along California (including Baja) but not ranging into the north coast or into oregon
And the Stellar's sea lion, which are WAY bigger and live in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska
A male Stellars sea lion showed up in SF like a month ago and just kinda. Didn't know what to do, and joined a colony of California sea lions, and is just kinda chilling there now.
Weird vagrant species happen from time to time, but this is just a particularly funny instance of a highly social species getting very lost, and just trying to blend in with its closest nearby relatives
My gf loves playing with my dick in bed because it's "like a little fidget toy"
Normal sized fidget toy
All these big companies changing their logos a dozen of times for something that looks worse every time, while the real all-time GOAT found the winning formula on the first try and then even did a victory lap with it:
Nothing! Traffic cones have nothing to do with media players. However they do have to do with the students that original made VLC. The original students used to steal traffic cones when they got drunk together and had amassed a collection of them. So the traffic cone was basically their mascot
Ok, lets have a look at this: Over the last few days a new paper in Science has led to MANY discussions in the paleo community and it appears to have breached containment into the wider world, judging by headlines and google results.
"Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans" by Ikegami et. al describes a new beak of the basal octopus genus Nanaimoteuthis. And yeah, it's a whopper! Just look at the specimen next to a giant squid beak in this figure! They also note that...
...beak shows some intense, asymmetrical wear, indicating a lot of hard objects being processed by this beak. On top of that they assign the genus to the group Cirrata (finned octopuses and relatives) instead of Vampyromorpha as it was in past papers. This is were the hard facts end though.
Don't get me wrong: This must have been a huge animal, but I also think that anything beyond this is purely speculative. The authors give a total length of 7 to 19 meters, an enormous range, with an estimated mantle length of max 4.4 m. They base this on the proportions of finned octopuses and other close relatives but I would argue that is just math for the sake of math. We know VERY little about early octopuses. Their beaks are often the only thing preserved and their diversity in the Cretaceous remains murky.
That's the size part, what I have an actual problem with though is the way they deduce behavior, died and even cognition from this fossil. Based on the size, wear and asymmetry they propose that this animal would compete, maybe even hunt large marine reptiles, in a smart way.
That's plain bullshitting in my eyes. Intense wear on a beak suggests this animal would be durophagous, going after armored or hard shelled prey. cracking the bones of marines reptiles feels very contrived and modern day octopuses (that often eat crabs) don't look much different.
The asymmetry of the beaks is an interesting detail but I would NEVER derive an argument for higher cognition from that. Cognitive abilities are next to impossible to grasp from the fossil record even IF you have the brain. Which leaves the question what was this guy doing?
Short answer is: we don't know. As I hopefully illustrated here we have simply too few data points to make any concrete arguments for this animals appearance or lifestyle. HOWEVER
As people pointed out on Discord: crushing shells in an pelagic habitat is something that was a breeze in the Mesozoic. Ammonites in the cretaceous come in many different shapes but also sizes. 50 cm plus species are not rare.
We also know from the Jurassic there were likely other cephalopods that went after ammonites. So if the ammonites grew in the Cretaceous why shouldn't their predators as well? Beyond ammonites the Late Cretaceous also gave rise to a large to gigantic bivales like many inoceramids
This abundance of durophagous prey is also reflected in the predators, large sharks, mosasaurs and even giant chimeras took advantage of this plentiful food source. I therefore think a large ammonite predator is a much more likely niche for Nanaimoteuthis.
In my interpretation I pair the octopus with the giant ammonite Parapuzosia, these animals aren't known from the same localities but their time ranges overlap which makes it plausible to me that these guys, or close relatives, could have met.
Lastly I want to quickly talk about the promotion and reception of this publication. While I don't completely fault the authors for their writing - after all LOOK AT THE MODERN ACADEMIC CLIMATE - I do think it's troubling that the editor's note, the journal itself, immediately evokes the image of the Kraken, a mythological creature, to sell it's new paper. This in combination with Science being a high profile journal makes it feel as if the claims in this publication are standing on more solid ground than they do. This is just my personal opinion but I think this is just bad science communication. It is something that will echo through the online sphere for years to come and does not in any way promote the caution that I would expect when claims like these are presented. Subsequently the ideas and evocative speech of the paper have already spawned a large amount of paleoart that goes for the largest and most speculative sides of it. Again: I think the size estimates in the paper are certainly possible, but I also think a more critical examination of the text is warranted when presented with such incredible claims. I am not here to kill your fun. But I also think that we are maybe looking at something even more interesting that the (at this point) already rather old trope of the mosasaur eating squid. At least to me a giant mollusk eats mollusk world is cooler.
AS ALWAYS, these are simply my opinions on these matters, but I thought there was enough uncritical yay and nay saying about this paper that I felt like it should warrant a reaction. I think the paper describes fascinating material and I eagerly await more!
"australian wildlife is so scary!"
Say fucking sorry to him right now or I'll fucking lose it
I finally got the opportunity to share this amazing tweet I have saved ages ago
screaming
A coworker of mine shared a story that she interviewed for a place, they asked her if she could become and animal, what would she be. She said dog, because they are loyal, friendly, and protect their family. The interviewer said that's wrong, because dogs are lazy. The correct answer was giraffe, because they reach high for leaves and that's a sign of ambition...
????????
it’s past fucking midnight and my grandmother got up and keeps loudly tearing paper right next to my room
by the way the reason there’s paper tearing is because she reads books by fucking tearing them apart page by page as she moves through them instead of just flipping the pages like a normal human
@adipemdragon
this is what her room looks like on a good day
note how even the hardcovers arent safe
okay
Its a lot about performance whether its in a theatrical sense or in an achievement one.
The "high functioning" kinds end up with high burnout rates. Its not "high function, low needs", its all high needs.
lions are very mean and like jellyfish
I am a friend to all cats. Yes even the mean ones. They have their reasons.
It's hard to do things when you don't want to. Has anyone else noticed this