seaserpent-i-guess @seaserpent-i-guess - Tumblr Blog

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spin-the-wheel-polls

Poof! You’re a mermaid now. Spin to get a type of mermaid! How we feeling about this?

You have been turned into this type of mermaid!!

What do you think?

I love it!!

it's alright

oh cool I didn't know this type existed!!

Result/other

Remaining time: 3 days 3 hours

(I do not know much about mermaids, forgive me if I made any mistakes. Do not drown me.)

#river nymph #I am OK with this

mylordshesacactus

For all that the 1800s etiquette guides are--obviously--derangedly sexist from a modern perspective? They're also mindblowing in how casually they will assert things that MODERN DAY CONSERVATIVES would scream and cry and shit their pants about.

"People back then always married young it's natural!!!" Every single 1800s guide I've ever met casually mentions that, of course, you really shouldn't get married before you're at least 20, and waiting until 25 is usually better.

Or, like. Okay here's a long segment:

Just firmly going "it is crazy sexist to blame The Wife for overspending when thirty seconds of asking questions will immediately establish that her husband was outright lying to her about how much money they had. Talk to your wife like a normal person."

Or--okay, here. A section on being honest and not writing love letters in secret, because that's usually a good sign that there's something untoward going on....

....except that he then immediately acknowledges that sometimes, the reason you're hiding this from your parents is that your parents suck. That there are parents who frankly have not earned the right to approve or disapprove of your partner.

(I realize the phrasing there sounds a lot less strong than my summary, but--trust me on this. When you're familiar with the narrative voice of these kinds of books, this passage is downright radical. The mere acknowledgement that if you treat your kids badly, it's your own damn fault when they don't talk to you? I've genuinely never seen that before in this genre. Don't freak out over "properly trained", either. It's just a linguistic shift--at the time, "training" was used the way we would say "raising" a child today. )

mylordshesacactus

"Delete all the nudes and sexts after a breakup or you're a piece of shit" has been the standard expectation since EIGHT. TEEN. EIGHTY. FIVE.

mylordshesacactus

"Men and women being friends with each other is literally normal. Don't be a controlling freak."

Anyway I was wrong the publishing date is actually 1882 so like.

mylordshesacactus

"If you have to abuse a child to keep order in your classroom then you're a bad teacher."

So like @ the modern Republican party, are the "traditional family values" in the fucking room with us right now--

cryingdancer

weirdmageddon

i know most people have seen it but i cant emphasize how much this is literally my favorite breath of the wild clip of all time. also i can never fucking find this clip when i need it especially in high definition so here it is

birds-and-friends

Full Video: Riekko mukana hiihtoreissulla, Tolkuton Willow ptarmigan included in ski trip

comixextra

For the love of god, PLEASE UNMUTE!!!

bombcollar

ptarmigan: [in a deep, croaking voice] awow awow awow awow awow awow awow. awow. awow. awow… awow… bup bup bup bup bup bup. pow. pow. pow.

tamamoland-of-the-deep-abyss

since football and football have the same names i think we should resolve this with my new sport Definitive Football, detailed thusly:

the field is a standard football field including the goals, goalposts, and end zones

there are four teams: two football teams, and two football teams

the two football teams play football and follow all the usual rules for it

at the same time

on the same field

while dodging around the teams playing the other football

either football can be interacted with by either team as if it were their football, including all rules for how they can interact with it and how they can score with it

tamamoland-of-the-deep-abyss

i think this would result in several exciting new and innovative forms of long-term injury

the-quasar-hero

I’m going to defeat you with the power of friendship and this gun I found

cherryhatter-deactivated2015072

KICK THE CAN!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.

visibun

the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now

drtanner

And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!

lets-go-steal-a-gimmick

Let's steal ourselves a secret good final episode.

gnar-slabdash

This was a long time ago, but I remember somebody once looked on AO3 for Leverage “fix-it” fics and found that a) very few existed and b) the ones that did exist were all crossovers where Leverage was used to fix problems in OTHER fandoms.

So yes, stealing secret good final episodes could be a whole Leverage crew side-gig

#leverage #incredible I love it

redstonedust

being too warm during the day: well, this sucks, but this temperature makes sense because the sun is up, and the sun is making me warm. i am unhappy but logically i can deal with it for now.

being too warm at night: what if i kill everybody.

ieattaperecorders

Trying to find an old tumblr post I used to see a lot.

It started with someone listing "places with uncanny energy," like gas stations on a road trip, empty movie theaters, etc.

Then someone reblogged it and said those are called "liminal spaces," defining liminal as in-between, neither one thing nor another.

It was the first time I'd seen the term "liminal" applied to places like that, and it's driving me crazy, I want to find and put a date on it so bad.

ieattaperecorders

NEVER MIND, I FOUND IT!!!

ieattaperecorders

Holy shit I just realized:

Tomorrow (July 4th, 2026) is the 10 year anniversary of the-crepes-of-wrath's comment, which:

Predates the 2020 spike in interest by four years

Predates the original backrooms post, and the the creation of r/liminalspaces by three years

Predates the earliest mention that KnowYourMeme attributes to Twitter by two years

I'm pretty sure this is the moment the term "liminal spaces" was attached to this sort of imagery, and it's TEN YEARS OLD TOMORROW!

LIMINAL SPACES TURN TEN TOMORROW! CELEBRATE BY GETTING LOST IN AN ABANDONED MALL!

deadbishop-blog

broken-horn-of-equius

Evidently landlord and lawyer were some rough slander 250 years ago, maybe we still have some things in common with the founding fathers

silencedrowns

my favorite thing about this movie is that it pissed off Nixon so badly (by having a song about how conservatives are obstructionist) that he tried to not only have the song cut but also get the negatives for that scene destroyed and they only added the song back in decades later

it’s on YouTube now though! So you can watch the musical number that made Nixon do a whiny baby tantrum!

beemovieerotica

shout out to the film’s editor who back in the 1970’s completely hid the negatives for that scene for decades allowing us to have it restored for the 2002 re-release

o-craven-canto

Abstract. Evolution has produced an astonishing array of organisms, but does it have limits and, if so, how are these overcome and how have

An interesting paper (Vermeij, 2015) on the "empty phenotypic space", i.e. the forms and adaptations that we do not see in the living world, possibly relevant to the convergence vs. contingency debate.

Some examples:

Wheels: some curled-up arthropods can roll around, and bacterial flagella and some parts of weevil legs rotate on their axis, but macroscopic wheels with a free axle do not exist, probably because smooth surfaces on which they'd be useful are rare and it would be difficult to grow them through embryonal development.

Animal-provided pollination and dispersal do not exist in water, with the possible exception of one species of fish-pollinated seagrass (which is a descendant of terrestrial plants). Presumably water is already good enough at carrying gametes and propagules that buying the services of an animal is a useless expense.

Mineral reef-building does not occur on land nor, more surprisingly, in freshwater. The reason for the latter is not clear, since there are enough mineral ions in freshwater to build shells. Boring of rock, shells, and wood in freshwater is also extremely rare though common in the sea.

Gelatinous plankton like salps or jellyfish (with few exceptions of the latter) is also not found in freshwater, probably because they can't survive dispersal between separate water bodies.

Endothermy ("warm blood") is generally not found in small aquatic animal, probably because water leeches away heat much faster than water, so aquatic endotherms (tunas, sharks, seals, whales) need to be bulky. On land, however, endothermy is found among tiny vertebrates and even insects.

There is no passive air-floating plankton, since air is not dense enough to support living tissue or dissolved organic matter by buoyancy. For that reason filter-feeding is also rare outside of water, while carnivorous plants are not found in the ocean (the water already carries enough nutrient). Aquatic plants do not produce wood as buoyancy is enough to keep them upright.

Large terrestrial animals do not specialize as scavengers (all mammals famous for scavenging also hunt actively); large carcasses are too spread out. All specialist scavengers on land are either very small, or flying.

Herbivory is rare among active fliers, because plant matter has a low energy density and takes a long time to digest. Herbivorous birds and insects are poor fliers or flightless, and the best fliers, like geese, are the ones that can take shelter in water.

Many more examples are only excluded from specific groups (e.g. live-bearing, despite being very common in reptiles, never appeared in birds, probably because the bird egg-shell is too mineralized to be retained in the womb as transition toward full live-bearing).

Even though the author calls them "forbidden phenotypes", only some of them are actually impossible (because they cannot evolve in the first place, or because they cost more energy than they're worth), and others simply never happened to evolve. At the end of the paper there is a list of phenotypes that would have been "forbidden" in the aftermath of the Cambrian Explosion and Ordovician diversification, but which appeared later, and they include

cutins, suberins, lignins, flavonoids, alkaloids, vascular systems, roots, leaves, rigid frameworks of stems and branches, nutrition complemented by animal matter, and basal growth in land plants; nitrogen-fixing symbiosis on land; animal-mediated dispersal/pollination; silk-producing, sound-emitting, flying, eusocial, terrestrial herbivorous, wood-boring, terrestrial shell-bearing and endothermic animals; embryos nourished within the body of an animal or plant parent; mineralized phytoplankton; and rock-excavating marine herbivores. [...] photosymbiotic and chemosymbiotic molluscs, the bivalved condition in gastropods, terrestrial life in gastropods and vertebrates, complex septa within the phragmocone of externally shelled cephalopods, internalization and loss of the shell in cephalopods, cementation to the substratum with a glue of calcium carbonate and organic matrix in several animal groups (gastropods, brachiopods, bivalves and barnacles), spines on shells of several groups (brachiopods, bivalves and brachiopods), mineralized tubes in polychaete annelids, mobility in bryozoans and pelmatozoan echinoderms, jaws and teeth in vertebrates, and vascular systems in brown and red algae. A vast diversity of potent venoms also lay in the future as part of the defensive and aggressive arsenal of many gastropods, cephalopods, aculeate Hymenoptera, vertebrates and land plants.

He also mentions phenotypes that were lost, but every listed adaptation seems to have survived in some group (e.g. complex spiny shells disappeared among cephalopods but survived in gastropods).

mizuthe-cat

awesome how you can just have ocs and they live in your brain forever and torment you

iguessyouregonnamissthepantyraid

i love this team so much. this dude ballerina twirled around the first defender who came at him and then hurdled backwards over the next one, an entire grown ass man, like it was nothing. like he's in a goddamn sports anime. unbelievable