[soulsplosion]

im being emo about dinosaurs again

[soulsplosion]

YES!!! YES!!!!!

[nevershootamockingbird]

[ Image One: A digital illustration of a singular quetzalcoatlus looking at the sky as the meteor strike causes the sky to be painted in shades of yellow, orange, red, pink, green, purple, and blue. The multi-colored explosion is reflected in the body of water in front of the quetzalcoatlus.

Image Two: Screenshot of tags that read "#oh my god.... #and for a moment; they all witnessed a sunrise more grand and more impossibly beautiful than any they'd ever seen before... #mm" / End ID ]

[pmamtraveller]

Cats and carpets

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[hypokeimena]

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)

[victusinveritas]

[parkchanwoohoo]

[geopsych]

Grasses in the wind.

[grubarchived]

green wheat field with cypress tree, vincent van gogh

[aflo]

A standard porno with the bad acting and music and whatnot but partway through the action the camera pans to a millipede and hunting spider locked in a duel for survival, the sounds of sex fade out and the scene in the background blurs, epic battle music starts to play

[luminarai]

Oh nooo I hadn’t noticed that my cat’s automatic feeder was getting low on food so as usual she dashed off when she heard the machine start but I couldn’t hear the usual sound of her food falling into the bowl so I went to look and my poor cat was just. Sitting there. Staring at her empty food bowl. Then for a second she glanced up at me then right back to her bowl with the biggest, saddest, most bewildered eyes you could ever imagine on such a small creature. I filled her bowl and the machine right away ofc but I still feel a little guilty 😭

[luminarai]

Quick artist’s rendition

[luminarai]

HOW did this get this many notes in less than 24 hours?????

Also, in case anyone was worried, rest assured mim the local void is missing no meals

[maureen2musings]

White Sands, New Mexico

emilie.hofferber

[svetzzi]

go away forever with me

[kopytki]

drew fanart of the thang

[thoodleoo]

*twirling my hair around my finger* hes just soooooo burdened by his sense of duty and the insurmountable weight of being a mere man written into the role of a myth

[muppetshow2026]

WHAT IS THE CHARGE? EATING A PENGUIN? A SUCCULENT ADÉLIE PENGUIN?

[anarqueeen]

yeah the doctor said they found the source of my guilt and quiet agony deep within my core. Yeah turns out there really is something physically and fundamentally wrong with me that I've been carrying my entire life. No they said they're not gonna remove it. Said its an "elective surgery" so insurance won't cover it. Anyway how are you

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

[wire-smith]

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

[charl0ttan]

something about sea arches tbh

[charl0ttan]

i want to believe that your beautiful language means anything more than that ruin comes for us all

[annabelle--cane]

the first law of tragedies: the end is already written and inevitable. the second law of tragedies: your actions are all your own and you can choose to get off this ride whenever you want. the third law of tragedies: we both know that you are never going to do that.

[thesiltverses]

Episode 3 of Our Wars Have Ended is live!

Episode 3: What His Fingers Remembered

Podcast Episode · Our Wars Have Ended · S1 E5 · 53m

In the conquered city of Catalfac, a young dead-diver takes on her newest contract - a job to descend into the depths of the Nether and retrieve valuable information.

Transcript is live here: https://www.ourwarshaveended.com/transcripts-episode-3

Cast List

This episode features, in order of their appearance:

Bekithemba Mbondiya as the Nameless Historian

Laya Lewis as Caul Serrikane

Méabh de Brún as The Severed Head Of Sister Bull

Gregory Dwyer as Caul's Fader

Adam Sam as Nametaker's Second

Gayle Why as The Nametaker

B. Narr as Vile-And-Repugnant Wiles

H.R. Owen and Syd Hymanson as Blinders-in-the-Guts

Additional voices by Kit Paterson, April Tuiolosega, Melissa Lusk

Content warnings

This episode contains homophobia and racism, violent death, suicide, vomiting, animal death, reference to torture.