wallacepolsom
pixel skylines
Cosmic Funnies
if i look back, i am lost
Game of Thrones Daily
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
ojovivo
★
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Fai_Ryy
@theartofmadeline
titsay
macklin celebrini has autism
Monterey Bay Aquarium
YOU ARE THE REASON
will byers stan first human second
No title available
Noah Kahan
The Stonewall Inn
Sweet Seals For You, Always
seen from Italy
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seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
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seen from Congo - Brazzaville
seen from Indonesia
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@mirach
tree grafting techniques
isn't it bizarre that people and animals have to match precise genetic markers for organ donation and take immunosuppressive medication for the rest of their life or else the body will reject it, yet you can pull all sorts of Frankenstein nonsense on plants and it will work so long as they're roughly in the same family
How I expected until the last second the sacrifice of Aziraphale and Crowley to go. You czechs are the best. This is 1000x better
Bonus : they're in love you're honor
Love it, hate it or just okay it; there’s one thing we can all agree on about the movie.
AINT NO WAY AZIRAPHALE WOULD’VE LET THE BOOK BURN.
It’s a BOOK and he’s AZIRAPHALE.
Never ever ever.
Ainur Week, here we go! I've decided I want to do a slightly unhinged amount of Tolkien fandom weeks over the span of the next few months.
I went back and forth about how to pick who to draw for Ainur Week, and I decided to narrow things down by going only with the Maiar (I want to redo my Valar series sometime soon). Some of these match up the correct day. Some don't. I did my best.
@ainurweek Day One: Eönwë
I like the idea that the Maiar go a little crazy with how they look. I think the Valar stick mostly to looking live Elves or Men, at least when they're dealing directly with them. I think the Maiar just do whatever they want. Eagle felt like an obvious design direction for the Herald of Manwë, and multiple wings for a sense of divinity. I spent way to long looking at types of eagles. I finally settled on Steller's Sea Eagle. Please look them up, the proportions of their beaks compared to their heads is wild. For colors, I matched the colors I used in my Manwë piece years ago.
The Aziraphale problem
There has been something wrong with Aziraphale since s2, but I was only able to put my finger on it now after the show's ending. Aziraphale was Terry Pratchett's character while Crowley was Gaiman's. I relate to Aziraphale in s1. I feel like I can understand him on a deep, personal level. But since s2, the mannerism is the same, but something is off.
Aziraphale as I understand him would not abandon his bookshop for years without finding a way to (sneakily, if needed) check on it and make sure all is well with it. Doubly so for Crowley. If he went to Heaven to help organize the Second coming (if he even trusted Heaven - they tried to burn him with hellfire!), he would find a way to involve Crowley without Crowley having to become an angel. They're on their own side, after all. Even if he was threatened (the popular "coffee theory"), he would find a way to comply with Heaven outwardly while staying on their own side - he has millenia of practice.
But that's not the Aziraphale we see in s2 and s3. Why? Because he's no longer Terry Pratchett's Aziraphale. Gaiman sees himself as Crowley, so he felt the need to make Crowley the one who's right, who loves the world more, who is better, and who was wronged. Retrospectively, it's visible from the very 1st scene of s2. It's the reversal of their roles. Before, it was Cowley who was besotted with Aziraphale since the first meeting when he got a glimpse of his true self. Now the roles are reversed. It's Aziraphale who admired Crowley since first meeting him as an angel. And all through s2 and s3, up until the very end, he still admires the angel without fully accepting the demon. This is not the Aziraphale I know.
And Crowley is different, too. Suddenly he is the one who would sacrifice everything for the world, while in s1, he didn't care for the world without Aziraphale in it. It was Aziraphale who was willing to do anything to save it. But Gaiman wanted Crowley to be more, as if loving Aziraphale so fully was not enough.
Maybe he does not understand loving someone as fully. Maybe he only understands how good it feels to be important. In s2, it wasn't as evident, and it could still be interpreted differently, but it is evident in s3. Gaiman did not want to honor his friend's memory, he wanted to be important, and in turn, he wanted Crowley to be important and outshine Aziraphale.
s3 did a good job of closing the story with the characters and setting it inherited from s2. But now it's evident that the characters are not the ones from s1, it's Gaiman's twisted version of them. And that's ok, people can have a different interpretation of the same character, and for some people it will fit their interpretation. I do not claim that my interpretation is better, but I don't have to accept the one in s2 and 3, either. Sir Terry's Aziraphale is the one I identify with, not Gaiman's.
Textile painting on linen about the slaying of the cold-drake Scatha by Fram, the fourth Lord of the Éothéod, inspired by the depiction of Sigurð slaying Fáfnir from the Hylestad Stave Church.
(A task for the 20th Tolkien Mailing Competition.)
Textile painting on linen about the slaying of the cold-drake Scatha by Fram, the fourth Lord of the Éothéod, inspired by the depiction of Sigurð slaying Fáfnir from the Hylestad Stave Church.
(A task for the 20th Tolkien Mailing Competition.)
With thanks to those that requested it, we are organising a sympathy card for Rachel Talalay following the loss of her husband and would like to invite Good Omens fans to sign:
Add your message to Rachel Talalay's card.
This is simply an opportunity to extend condolences and kindness during a difficult time.
Whatever opinions or disagreements people may hold, harassment is unacceptable. We do not condone that behaviour, and it should never define this fandom.
Compassion costs nothing and it is reflective of the community many of us want to be in. If you'd like to sign, please do so by Sunday 24th May - otherwise, please scroll on by.
Let's do the right thing, folks.
Good Omens 3 spoilers
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GO s1 was amazing. GO s1 made me fall in love with Aziraphale and Crowley and write so many fanfics about them.
GO s2 made me stop writing them. It wasn't finished, and I was waiting for the conclusion to see whether I'll accept it as their true story.
After GO 3, I can accept it as one of the versions, but not the only one. It's an ending true to the characters and their love but... what about everything else? It takes away the comforting feeling of s1, where you could imagine an angel and demon living in this world, loving each other. That's not true anymore. They still love each other, but they're no longer an angel and a demon. The phone call during covid? That didn't happen here, that happened in a different universe with similar history, billions of years ago.
Maybe Heaven and Hell were flawed since the beginning. But I think they deserved a chance of redemption, not erasure. I think it could have been done... *can* be done. The finale showed us one important thing, although it was one that we already knew (but it is nice to have it acknowledged): their love is a constant in every universe.
We can imagine them in our world as humans, and it's not even that much of an AU anymore. But we can also imagine a world where s2 and the finale didn't happen, and the story went another way towards an ending where Heaven and Hell are also redeemed. I've already written two such stories and I'm actually a bit relieved that the finale didn't make them feel less valid to me. In Back to the Roots, they get there through a lot of pain, while in A Special Place in Hell (co-written with @hotcrosspigeon), Hell is redeemed through their typical shenenigans.
In any case, the finale was a closure. We don't have to wait and wonder how the story ends anymore. We can accept the important parts of it (Aziraphale and Crowley do and will love each other, in every universe), and we are free to imagine them in any version of the universe we like.
I want all animals to become sapient enough to produce art specifically because I want to see what sort of sex homunculus caricature each species would create if given the ability to draw
Like we've already got the anime waifu with the needle-waist and watermelon-bazonkas and borzoi-legs and bug-eyes. Now show me a fucked-up stupid beetle as drawn by a horny beetle. I want to see what a cartoonishly sexy lion looks like according to lions. I want to see the most ridiculous drawing of a peahen that would have the peacocks squaring up by the fountain.
We give this power to ostriches and they just start drawing people
You can actually see the bug version in some orchids. The orchid takes the bug's idea of "sexy" and makes a flower that attracts the males better than the actual female.
(Picture from the paper "Pollinators as Isolation Mechanisms: Field Observations and Field Experiments regarding specificity of pollinator attraction in the genus Ophrys" by Paulus (2018))
Good Omens 3 spoilers
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GO s1 was amazing. GO s1 made me fall in love with Aziraphale and Crowley and write so many fanfics about them.
GO s2 made me stop writing them. It wasn't finished, and I was waiting for the conclusion to see whether I'll accept it as their true story.
After GO 3, I can accept it as one of the versions, but not the only one. It's an ending true to the characters and their love but... what about everything else? It takes away the comforting feeling of s1, where you could imagine an angel and demon living in this world, loving each other. That's not true anymore. They still love each other, but they're no longer an angel and a demon. The phone call during covid? That didn't happen here, that happened in a different universe with similar history, billions of years ago.
Maybe Heaven and Hell were flawed since the beginning. But I think they deserved a chance of redemption, not erasure. I think it could have been done... *can* be done. The finale showed us one important thing, although it was one that we already knew (but it is nice to have it acknowledged): their love is a constant in every universe.
We can imagine them in our world as humans, and it's not even that much of an AU anymore. But we can also imagine a world where s2 and the finale didn't happen, and the story went another way towards an ending where Heaven and Hell are also redeemed. I've already written two such stories and I'm actually a bit relieved that the finale didn't make them feel less valid to me. In Back to the Roots, they get there through a lot of pain, while in A Special Place in Hell (co-written with @hotcrosspigeon), Hell is redeemed through their typical shenenigans.
In any case, the finale was a closure. We don't have to wait and wonder how the story ends anymore. We can accept the important parts of it (Aziraphale and Crowley do and will love each other, in every universe), and we are free to imagine them in any version of the universe we like.
Chinese dancer performs bellydance(Raqs Sharqi) in his oc assassin style (cr 舞贝勒）
Fragile life. At first I wanted it to be autumn around them but thought that spring can be even sadder
Hug me from the inside out
Anyway yew trees are the best trees for making bows with but they grow very slowly, much too slow to sustainably satisfy the demand for bows, which is why there are very few wild yew forests left in the world. People eventually stopped making bows out of them for this reason, but I don't think they're actually protected at all despite the radical shrinking of their native territory because people will still cut veteran yews down for landscaping reasons as per that one very angry conservationist article I read. One thing that I did look up but struggled to find reliable sources on was the symbolism of the yew tree in pre-Christian celtic cultures. I found a number of well-sourced lists of symbolism that Christians applied to them but when I went searching specifically for pre-Christian cultures the sources got a lot less reliable. It was the habit of early Christians to simply borrow other cultures' symbolism without altering it much at all, so I imagine the symbolism would be pretty much the same but I would still like to have more information about it. Anyway the entire tree is extremely toxic except for the red fruit surrounding the aril, which is a potent laxative. Reports indicate that it doesn't taste good but I think they're just lying so people don't accidentally eat the arils and die
Look me in the eye and tell me this isn't the juciest most succulent berry you've ever seen. The seed inside will kill you slowly and painfully. BTW
A 5 year old boy with no significant past medical history presents with his mother to the Emergency Department after a berry ingestion.
The five year old who ate a few in this case said they were yummy and I trust him in this case more than I trust someone lecturing me about how poisonous it is
I can confirm they are yummy and perfectly safe if you don't eat the seed (the tree relies on birds to eat those and spread the undigested seeds). They have a mild sweetness with a slightly slimy texture. I don't know about the laxative effect, I have eaten up to 10 with no such effect, so it's probably not that potent.
Behold the pocket-sized western pygmy possum! (Cercartetus concinnus). One of the world’s smallest possums, this species typically weighs just 0.5 oz (14 g)—the size of an AA battery. This dainty marsupial is a nectarivore, meaning that its diet consists primarily of plant nectar. It inhabits treetops in forests throughout parts of Australia, using its long prehensile tail like a fifth limb as it moves from branch to branch.
Photo: Donna Belder, CC BY 4.0, iNaturalist
A spring cartoon for New Scientist
