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squeakitties

i just rescued a pill bug they’re gonna reward me with a million pill bucks i’m gonna be a fucking pillionaire

giant-isopod-overlord

💵🫲}([[[[[)

squeakitties

I JUST MADE ONE PILLION DOLLARS

mercutio-the-velaryon

God they should've taken Ibuprofen together

#arcane

tlirsgender

Anxiety will have you thinking "I have GOT to get out of here" and you're in your own home in the living room watching tv

tlirsgender

In my defense the overhead light was on

yossyislandd

the white house is such a stupid name. if i were president the first thing i would do is call it the pussy pavilion. the second thing i would do is unleash the bugs of the night

thefloralmenace

So this was inspired by a discussion I had with a friend yesterday.

It started with me mentioning offhand that once upon a time, I had considered arguing with my university that they should publicly post their class schedules because technically, anyone is allowed to sit in on a class, but that's practically blocked off from the community by virtue of them not having access to when and where the courses are happening.

He immediately pulled up a public-facing version of the course scheduling system that I never knew existed and said something like "If people really wanted that information, they could find it."

Information accessibility is a big deal to me, so then I started to explain that "not knowing what you don't know" and the vast amount of info people have to sift through are real barriers to people obtaining information and also that "This doesn't exist," and "I can't find it," look exactly the same, so if people can't find something, they will eventually give up because of diminishing returns on the effort of looking for something that may not exist.

But he just kept saying different versions of "Well if people REALLY wanted it, they'd go find it," which really surprised me because he's liberal, very intelligent and very into philosophy, but he couldn't seem to see the logical end result of a philosophy about information access that basically comes down to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps (and if you can't, you didn't deserve to succeed)."

So he went on this rant about how the general public should simply know almost all information is out there and put in the effort to find it (without any outreach or effort to engage the public on this), and I said,

"You will be perpetually angry at how unmotivated and badly informed the public is with your current attitude. And it will never improve without people who do not have your attitude. This is the reality you are doomed to because of this perspective. It's neither good nor bad. I'm not faulting you for it, but no matter what you have to say to justify your perspective, this will always be the result."

Because any "BUT THE WORLD WOULD BE BETTER IF PEOPLE WOULD JUST ____" philosophy is USELESS if you expect "people" (i.e. the public at large) to spontaneously start or stop doing something without some kind of outside effort - an outreach campaign, an educational movement, an incentive, etc.

If you're falling into those kind of thought patterns, it's not going to be productive for you or society because you're always going to be mad, and you're never going to do anything to change the things that make you mad because you're too caught up in your own feelings of indignance and frustration.

loki-zen

The moment I knew the new management company for my flats was gonna be worthless was when they put out an email saying something like

"Do not pile rubbish bags on top of the big outside trash containers when they're full already! They can fall off and split open and what if we get rats, yuck."

... with no mention whatsoever of what they expect people to do instead, nevermind the self-awareness to consider that if this is a regular problem, you probably don't have enough trash containers.

I only worked for a bit over a year in the kinds of library job where I have any real role in managing the space that the users are in, but even that was enough for me to learn: if there's trash on the shelves/floor and you want there to not be, you don't just scold people or put up a sign telling them not to do that. You put a bin in that area.

The kinda problem you're talking about at the university is actually a big deal in library and information science, it's called "discoverability". If resources aren't discoverable by users it doesn't matter how good they are! And so we study this whole field of 'information-seeking behaviour' to try to figure out how to make sure people do find what they need

eclecticopposition

what is THE worst thing you've ever drank. all liquids acceptable. please tell me what it was, bonus points for why

carby

Hey whoa hi. Hello. I am looking directly into your ear canal. What do you mean you drank a tube of virus concentrate.

whyamiherewhosummonedme

So, I was working in a lab, right? My job in the lab was preparing a pure, concentrated enough sample of virus. This is tricky since, y'know, viruses require hosts to replicate, but you then need to get the host cells (and the pieces of the host cells that died!) out of the sample while still keeping the viruses. Once I'd finished and the samples had been sent to the database for analysis as well as a second one sent to be frozen for future reference, there was still some left over that needed to be disposed of.

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)

(for science.)

violetthunderstorm

You have a fitting blog title

nico-the-overlord

this post is getting 50k easy

marlinspirkhall

420technoblazeit

kind of obsessed with the characterization of jayce and viktor as fundamentally good people who will also go absolutely batshit insane if you separate them because theyre also ridiculously codependent to a degree that is concerning for everybody else's wellbeing. they were literally away from each other for a couple of months and almost ended the entire world

#arcane #arcane spoilers

fuckingmachineherald

jayvik as textposts [6/?]

#implication of 🔞#arcane

lunerabo-deactivated20250206

“Get his ass” Is so unreasonably funny to me. A huge win for the English language. Today’s version of “seize him” imo

dubioushonour

someone had to no one had to

#off game

reallapiscake12

WE ARE BACK OFF FANDOM

“I’m the Batter. I’ve been entrusted with a sacred mission.” -- One of the most influential RPGs of the last 20 years is finally coming to S

#off game #video #link

pussiesaregod

once i beat the depression and the burnout and the anxiety and the loneliness and the exhaustion and the guilt and the awkwardness and the apathy and the low income and the chronic illness and the impatience and the vulnerability and the creative block and the capitalism and the cruelty THEN you'll see

a-dinosaur-a-day

ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be "let's talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!" got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr

parttimepunner

Please tell me more about these extinct ecosystems. Why did they go extinct? Could an ecosystem like that return?

a-dinosaur-a-day

When I say "extinct ecosystem", I mean those ecosystems that have existed in the past, with extinct animals and plants etc. inhabiting them

by their very definition, they are gone forever

there are ones that were truly unique, like Polar Tropical Forests and Fern Prairies, that we just could not have today

but there were ones that have equivalents to today, as well, like the first savannahs and steppes of the Miocene - they just have earlier versions of the plants and animals

there were so many because there are so many today, and each one had its own flora and fauna and was glorious

There's the wetlands and forests of Hell Creek in the Latest Cretaceous

the bizarre Volcanic Lake Forests of the Jehol Biota

whatever the hell the Ediacaran Reefs were

the Scale Tree Swamp Forests of the Carboniferous

"Mesozoic 2" aka pre-human Aotearoa

the Western Interior Seaway dominated by Mosasaurs

and so many other things, I couldn't possibly list them all. Every time period had its own biosphere and biomes, and they were all unique.

a-dinosaur-a-day

#i wanna see the Aurora Borealis over a tropical forest#BC Canada has a Boreal Rainforest so you can definitely get that

that isn't what I mean by "Polar Tropical Forest"

I mean a tropical forest

at the poles

ie, the ecosystems present during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

we have fossils of plants that showcase how different tropical plant lifestyles had to be up at the poles because of the light weirdness

the important part is "tropical", not "wet/rainforest". those are two different things

Temperate and Boreal Rainforests are wonderful and some of my favorite living biomes, but they aren't what I was talking about

adeptarcanist

May I ask about the fern prairies? That sounds really cool!

a-dinosaur-a-day

Grass is a relatively recent thing

it first evolved in the latest Cretaceous, but it didn't actually take over everywhere until the Miocene, when grasses that process light differently (look up C3 vs C4 photosynthesis) evolved and just took the fuck over the planet

before then, other plants formed the low ground cover over the earth, and in many places those plants were ferns - spread all over the ground and covering it, much like grass, but significantly less dense. Dirt would have been much more common everywhere.

This is why I am begging every single game developer to remember that grass is not a neutral ground cover

im-flashtoo

My favorite extinct ecosystem, if it counts while being as physically tiny as it was, is the floating logs that existed in the ocean between the first appearance of woody trees and the first appearance of organisms that could break down wood - floating reefs of a sort, trailing enormous filter-feeding crinoids below them. The baleen whales of their time

a-dinosaur-a-day

yeah that counts! And how bizarre those must have been!!!

i-draws-dinosaurs

Speaking of reefs, we're so used to rocky or coral reefs in the moderns world but there have been so many different reefs throughout prehistory that were made of things that straight up don't exist any more!

Like the reefs of the late Devonian, which were made of stromatoporoids, which may have resembled corals but were actually a highly diverse extinct group of sponges!

This is one of my own reconstructions of a stromatoporoid reef off the coast of Devonian Australia (plus anachronistic underwater baited camera):

The Cretaceous also had some wild extinct reefs which are known as carbonate reefs and were dominated by a group of bivalve molluscs called rudists!

ferncube

Scale tree swamps are the only one of these I know anything about and they were SO WEIRD. There's definitely some controversy about how they functioned cause these things are hard to work out from fossils, but the current thinking is that these trees shot up to around 100 feet tall in 10-15 years, grew more tightly packed together than basically any modern forest, produced spores one time and then promptly keeled over and died. Forests just do not work like this anymore! It's not just different types of trees, it's a whole *different type of forest* that has gone extinct! Different nutrient cycling, different natural rhythms, different everything!

Even today there are all kinds of niche hyperlocal ecosystems that function in their own distinct ways - shale barrens, waxcap grasslands, cataract bogs. What else have we just never seen??

a-dinosaur-a-day

Anxiety over all the prehistoric organisms we’ll never know, meet your big sibling: anxiety over all the prehistoric ECOSYSTEMS we’ll never know

ymfingsteadilyon

@headspace-hotel So it sounds like the scale tree swamps that @ferncube mentioned would've worked on the same principle as American bamboo stands?

headspace-hotel

I love this post! Thank you @ymfingsteadilyon for tagging me!

About the American bamboo, yes it's similar!—Arundinaria species grow as large clonal colonies. These colonies take time to establish, but once they reach a particular size, they start growing and expanding much faster, with the height of the canes beginning to exceed 15 ft. or more.

Arundinaria bamboos typically only produce seed once and die soon afterward. So yeah! They shoot up in a relatively short period of time, growing very very dense and nearly impenetrable thickets, and then they die—so the little seedlings produced by the flowering event will have enough light to live (we think).

The American bamboo is relevant in more than one way, actually, because broadly speaking, canebrakes are an extinct ecosystem. (But we can still bring them back, in some sense, so it's a little different.) Before colonization, there were canebrakes that stretched for miles, essentially forests of 30-40ft tall bamboo (I don't actually know how tall it got at maximum, it seems related to the overall size of the 'brake) and this was a huge component of the Southeastern USA ecosystem. When the land was colonized, almost all the canebrakes were destroyed, and it is thought that this is in fact part of the cause of the extinction of Carolina parakeets, Bachman's warblers, and passenger pigeons.

The plant was essentially a keystone species, and nowadays it is so little known, the only people really advocating for it right now are the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, for whom it's a fundamental part of their culture because in the past it was used for EVERYTHING. Arrows, blowguns, mats, baskets, backpacks, fish traps, frames and containers of all sorts, musical instruments, torches, you can even eat the seeds and the young shoots, this plant is everything. But it's so rare now that native artisans are having trouble finding canes big enough to work with.

You can still see rivercane nowadays, but it mostly grows in very small, scruffy, sad-looking patches in ditches and the like, and struggles to clear 10ft in height. It sometimes also establishes little thickets in the undergrowth of forests, but without controlled burning, it can't do well.

Canebrakes are a fire-dependent ecosystem, they thrive with human caretakers. I THINK there are a couple contiguous acres of canebrake extant in Alabama and South Georgia, but I met with a guy who has devoted his life's career to studying the stuff, and he told me the largest canebrake he'd ever seen was around 200x500 feet. FEET.

this ecosystem is so rare people who study it can't even FIND an extant example bigger than a large backyard, and it's not protected and barely anybody knows what it is.

I was 22 when I learned that Kentucky not only had a native bamboo species, but also is possibly NAMED AFTER BAMBOO (Kain-tuck, "kain" as in cane), and long story short I was so fucked up over this information that I couldn't do anything except decide to devote my entire career to studying it.

hi, im getting a degree in plants now

by the way, Kentucky gets even weirder, because the Bluegrass Region used to be what is known as an oak savanna. Basically, an open savanna environment full of wildflowers with giant fuckoff huge oak trees forming 10-50% canopy coverage. And between the oak trees, a lot of the open areas were full of bamboo. There was straight up nothing else like this on Earth.

You can still see a few of the oak trees. If you are driving in the Lexington area and you see an oak tree that is so goddamn BIG you want to pull over on the side of the road and take pictures of it? That's a pre-colonization oak tree. You're welcome.

Kentucky bluegrass, by the way, is not native to Kentucky. None of the low-growing turfgrasses people use in lawns are. The ground would have been covered in tons of clover, which supposedly reached as high as horses' knees. (There are like, 3 Trifolium species we know about that would have been among the native clover, and they're all endangered to critically endangered, because killing the Bison and their caretakers, the native peoples, fucked them over so bad.)

#stuff and things