Speaking of Doorknobs

AKA @effulgentinara - A vivid assortment of fancy-catchers and objects of shininess. (aka a firehose of my current fixations) Everything queued unless tagged otherwise. Likes/comments will be from my main/original works blog effulgentinara

[nitewrighter]

I love you samosas. I love you empanadas. I love you pasties. I love you dumplings. I love you pirozhkis. I love you savory food in a convenient little carb purse.

[ghazal67]

[daco-broman]

flex on em

[robotlyra]

EXCUSE ME?

[cashonlydreams]

That reveal though

[pleasetrysomethingelse]

[imthegirlwhowaited]

the russian commentary is truly the best part though

“He’s huge!! So chubby!”

“Is he gonna goddamn dive already for fuck’s sake?”

“Just let him catch his breath, let him catch his breath!”

[kraznyoktyabr]

That is a Steller’s sea lion. Adult males can get up to 2500 pounds. Big suckers. Only things larger in the pinniped family are walruses and elephant seals.

They can also hold their breath for 20 minutes so he probably wasn’t too stressed from being caught in the net.

They tend to follow fishing boats and steal fish from the nets, as well as eat the bycatch that’s thrown overboard, because it’s less effort. This guy probably was trying to steal fish just at exactly the wrong time.

[swan2swan]

Men: *spraying the hose*

HIM: 

[victusinveritas]

Comic by Joe Flanders.

[officiallordvetinari]

So do we think RTD...

1) Had a plan for the Billie Piper thing, didn't get around to writing a full script but has an idea scrawled on a post-it note that he'll hand to the next showrunner, or

2) Still hasn't decided what Billie was doing there; is hoping the next person comes up with something cool

?

1

2

Remaining time: 4 hours 2 minutes

[penny-anna]

oh god sudden thought

so as per various DC social media concepts Clark has a Superman twitter where he posts left-leaning but fairly safe & tame stuff e.g. happy pride from Superman. Clark Kent also has his own twitter account where he posts his actual opinion.

what happens if uh. what happens if he forgets which account he's logged into.

[penny-anna]

scenario 1: what's clearly an official Superman post pops up on some rando journalist's twitter and is noticed before he can delete it. leads to controversy when people conclude that Superman has hired this Clark Kent person to do his social media. Clark now has to deal w the fact that everyone thinks he's Superman's social media manager. employers at the Daily Planet very confused as to why he didn't tell them about his side gig

scenario 2: world wakes up to Superman tweeting about how he hates the police

[the-legal-shipper]

Scenario 2: “world wakes up to Superman tweeting about how he hates the police” and then the Shazam twitter account starts agreeing with him and that’s how the world finds out that two of the most powerful heros both hate the police

[penny-anna]

Billy, seeing what Superman just tweeted: oh cool we're allowed to say fuck the police now!!

[offonaherosjourney]

Someone tweets if Bruce Wayne pays taxes, and Bruce accidentally replies with his Batman account with a simple "Yes", so people start to think that besides beating up villains, Batman also spends his time staring menacingly at billionaires while they fill their taxes to make sure there's no creative accounting going on

[nightblackowlbat]

BruceWayneOfficial: yes, the rumors are true. Batman is my accountant.

[dambiex]

the problem with parents is that they are undiagnosed

[lakariancityamusementcenteradult]

Was Julian Bashir robbed for the Carrington?

Yes, his work on biomolecular replication was both audacious and groundbreaking

No, his nomination was premature

Other answer

Remaining time: 5 days 23 hours

[collapsedsquid]

Every year, doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan Province of China brace themselves for an influx of people with an unusual complaint. The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture. The hospital treats hundreds of these cases every year. All share a common culprit: Lanmaoa asiatica, a type of mushroom that forms symbiotic relationships with pine trees in nearby forests and is a locally popular food, known for its savory, umami-packed flavor. In Yunnan, L. asiatica is sold in markets, it appears on restaurant menus and is served at home during peak mushroom season between June and August.

[str-ngeloop]

i love bizzarely specific hallucinogens

[str-ngeloop]

The hospital treats hundreds of these cases every year. All share a common culprit: Lanmaoa asiatica, a type of mushroom that forms symbiotic relationships with pine trees in nearby forests and is a locally popular food, known for its savory, umami-packed flavor. In Yunnan, L. asiatica is sold in markets, it appears on restaurant menus and is served at home during peak mushroom season between June and August. One must be careful to cook it thoroughly, though, otherwise the hallucinations will set in. "At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, 'Don't eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'" says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica. "It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there."     [...]

He and his team are still trying to identify the chemical compound responsible for the hallucinations in L. asiatica. Current tests suggest it is not likely related to any other known psychedelic compound. For one, the trips it produces are unusually long, commonly lasting one to three days after an onset of 12 to 24 hours, and in some cases even causing hospital stays of up to a week. Because of the extraordinarily long duration of these trips and the chance for prolonged side effects such as delirium and dizziness, Domnauer has yet to try the raw mushrooms himself. These mega-trips might help to explain why people in China, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea do not seem to have a tradition of purposefully seeking out L. asiatica for its psychoactive effects, according to Domnauer's findings. "It was always just eaten for food," Domnauer says, with hallucinations being an unexpected side-effect. There's another curious factor: other known psychedelic compounds also usually produce idiosyncratic trips that vary not only from person to person but also from one experience to the next within the same individual. With L. asiatica, though, "the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported", Domnauer says. "I don't know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations."

[melongifts]

Hey anyone notice how google translate is being pretty liberal with their translations as of late? Takin some real liberties to infer tone.

[melongifts]

ask and ye shall receive: When I write in Japanese I usually also throw it in google translate to double check that I'm not using the wrong kanji by mistake, and two years ago it gave me very dry and literal translations.

I was doing it today and noticed it had a pretty strong voice added to the output

For reference, to give a dry translation I would put: Lately I'm into in Hanafuda. Nobody seems to know anything about it here, so they probably wouldn't understand my brilliant jokes. I guess you guys will never be able to understand "Mister November and the Scary Cave".

I have a fluent friend who is able to check my work for me and give me tips on hitting the correct tone (I was going for a comically casual feeling), so I'm confident that I'm expressing the feeling I'm intending. While Google is also hitting the same emotion, I really don't like knowing that it's assigning tone in the first place.

To check if it was editorializing based on informal grammatical choices, I formal'd up the writing to be more polite and remove any non-standard vocabulary.

I'm just like... what is anyone who is translating what I'm thinking into their own language going to think when a translation app decides that it knows my intended tone? When online communication is already so complicated and nuanced? I'm a non-native so I'm spending ages agonizing over 117 characters, but when I'm chatting in English I'm not being so deliberate. How likely is it that tools that 'naturalize' are going to make choices that don't reflect reality and lead to insulting misunderstandings? I spoke with an English learner just yesterday who thought they were being bullied (they were not, the commenter in question was just excitedly infodumping about sociology) because something was lost in translation, and I wonder if it's because of tools making choices like this. I'm just a luddite I don't trust stuff like this. stinks of ai asking me if it can rerwrite my email in a more quirky style.

[melongifts]

What do you mean I'm just using the browser versi-

I AM SO SICK OF DEFAULT AI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[maybemayii]

Jacob Anderson talking about the icons that shaped his Louis — Grace Jones & Eartha Kitt (Part ll)

[monkeypng]

the fuck you lookin at keep scrolling

[microraptorhours]

i love you archival work. i love you alphabetizing. i love you sorting. i love you reshelving. i love you document restoration. i love you shelf reading. i love you inventorying. i love you analysis. i love you archival work.

[alphabetizing-posts]

alphabetizing. analysis. archival archival document i i i i i i i i i inventorying. love love love love love love love love love reading. reshelving. restoration. shelf sorting. work. work. you you you you you you you you you

[victusinveritas]

[autistobrat]

scientists are experimenting on cross-breeding a crab and a cheetah; things could go sideways real fast

[sparrowlucero]

dinosaur discourse

[gallusrostromegalus]

I am going to spoil the joke under the cut, but in service of giving some additional context that makes it even funnier:

If you're having trouble telling what the difference is between the two dinos, the joke is that there is virtually no difference, save for a feature we have no actual physical evidence for (unless there's been a big update I missed, we don't have any conclusive evidence of what large therapods were colored like).

This does not stop every paleoart subreddit or twitter/bsky artist following from being full of the most utterly miserable bickering pedants having wildly disproportionate reactions to minor and purely theoretical... I can't even call them arguments. Just different ideas.

Meanwhile, the paleoartists I know from my master's program- the people who are doing the illustrations for real museums like the smithsonian and university teaching materials- are out there having fun and going "How much can I make this Tyrannosaur look like a flamingo? It's not like there's anything to suggest they were NOT bright pink :)"

[sario528]

Hey Gallus, as an Actual paleoartist, what do you think of this?

[gallusrostromegalus]

So my master's is in Botanical Illustration, not Paleontological Illustration, but I did Email this to my profs that would make redditors explode and they offered the following notes:

Overall: The vibes are immaculate, but Probably Not

We have some fossil evidence to suggest juvenile Rexes were downy, but adults were almost certainly not

Especially not like this, because sparrows are floofy because they're little animals that live in temperate climates with cold winters, and T-Rex was a Very Large Animal living in tropical climates. It did not need the insulation.

That's a pose a T-rex could strike but not it's natural habit. The artist has also fudged the proportions a bit, in a very plausible way so always double-check your measurements and reference sources to make sure you're not making stuff up

T-rex would have had no need for flight feathers like depicted on the wings and tail, and it comes from earlier in the evolutionary tree than flighted dinosaurs so it wouldn't have them vestigially either

HOWEVER:

It's extremely valid and compelling to consider how feathering might have radically changed the silhouettes, especially in terms of camouflage and insulation for some of the smaller and midsize dinosaurs

Patterning and cryptic camouflage are also very valid interpretations, even on a giant non-aquatic predator, because a ton of animals are paler on the underside

The little bright cheek puffs are something that might have shown up as skin pigmentation, esp given that Rexes had extremely good vision and probably fairly sociable so communicative coloration would be a very valid and reasonable choice

They think its very cute and funny and they're all emailing this image to each other and printing it to put it on office doors

[byjove]

the worldwide moose belt

except for Britain and Ireland, where moose do not meese

[speakingofdoorknobs]

They used to meese, but they meese no more, although there is some movement towards re-mooseing them.

[hedgehog-moss]

I was in a waiting room earlier and there was a radio on, with a quiz show. A little kid in the waiting room was listening intently, sometimes whispering answers to his mum and he looked proud when they turned out to be right. And at one point the question was "What kind of animal is grown on a bouchot?" (The French word for the stake that mussels grow on) The kid had a baffled frown, and the quiz show candidate wasn’t finding the answer either so the presenter added helpfully, "A bouchot is a sort of wooden stick in the sea…" The look on the kid’s face had morphed to one of clear concern, at the concept of growing animals on a stick in the sea—but then his face lit up with the sudden light of perfect understanding and he said "Dolphins!!"