The Cuteness War @tecknowmancer - Tumblr Blog

The spirit of Diogenes is alive and well

This is funny, obviously, but even if you don't go to the extreme of the example above, this is a separate seat for one person, with a back and 4 legs:

But it's not a chair. It's a bar stool.

This, however, are all chairs:

Each one is missing at least one component of the chair definition above.

So like... it's almost like strict definitions are exclusionary.

lizluvscupcakes

Reblog to hit a transphobe with a separate seat for one person

phantomrose96

Sometimes I go to myself "you know, I don't understand what NFTs are" and then I go look it up again and discover, yes, actually I do know what NFTs are. It's just that every time I read about them again I'm left going "this CAN'T be it, there has to be something else to make this make sense" and the answer is always no.

phantomrose96

authorkims

everythingfox

wiggle wiggle wiggle

(via)

prokopetz

The thing about the default setting of Dungeons & Dragons is that evil is self-defeating not in a metaphysical sense, but in the sense of each individual force of evil being comprised principally of people who suck.

Mind flayers are so invincibly convinced of their own cleverness that their collective history is just an endless litany of them suffering completely predictable ass-kickings at the hands of their own creations, to the point that they’ve lost their empire and been forced to live in caves and still can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong.

Beholders assume that everybody everywhere is just as treacherous and scheming as they are, and consequently spend most of their time quivering in fortified bunkers freaking out about elves on the moon and completely failing to notice the adventurers on their doorstep.

Chromatic dragons are individually unstoppable, but are incapable of even the most basic coordinated effort because two chromatic dragons in the same geographic region will spend all of their time and energy fighting over which one of them should be in charge.

The collective infernal armies of the Abyss and the Nine Hells could conquer the multiverse basically any time they felt like it, but they never will, because they’ve spent the last billion years slaughtering each other in what amounts to a massive ideological slapfight about the correct way to be evil.

And the funny part is that there’s no overarching authorial agenda that got us here. It’s a bunch of different writers in a bunch of different versions of the game published over many decades independently arriving at the conclusions that a. it’s beneficial for the game if the players can have stupid arguments with the monsters, and b. those arguments will be more entertaining to play out if the monsters are a bunch of dork-ass losers.

quasi-normalcy

I don’t know who the artist is, but I got it from @cyfir1 on Twitter,

ettaberrytea

This Art is by Will Burrows. He is also the creator of the “friends of Garak” t-shirt. You can see more of his art on twitter @ dwight_tokem.

tinsnip

FUCKING ALL OF THESE SHIRTS

stra-tek

Imagine being lost on the Enterprise all alone and it’s just miles and miles of corridors like this

oldhollywoodpangurban

Oh, let me tell you a story…

I was a production assistant on “Deep Space Nine”.

One day I was in a hurry, and decided to shave a half minute off my journey but zipping through a soundstage and out the other side. It was Stage Four, and held Ops, some personal quarters, Sisko’s quarters, the Cargo Bay.. and hallways.

It was lit, because we were moving there later in the afternoon. I began jogging through the corridor and stopped right in the middle, where I could see neither end of the set piece. Suddenly, I WAS THERE. I was on the station. It was a complete alternate reality feeling, almost deja-vu, a deep familiarity. I paused, and a chill ran down my spine.

But I was in a hurry, and my feet took me quickly to the end of the set, and I looked back… yep, just a lit set, all alone on the soundstage, nothing I hadn’t seen a thousand times.

And yet. I had been there. On the station. For a split second, I was no longer on Stage Four, on the Paramount lot, in the middle of Los Angeles. I was in Bajoran space, on a station in the stars. It was only a moment… but the feeling and the memory has never, ever left me.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone else experienced the same thing.

babyanimalgifs

Marine life specialists noticed a spotted eagle ray mother was having trouble and helped her deliver two baby rays

(Source)

fionn-o-nassus

They’re so cute! Such

artissijamm

catgirl-kaiju

There are many benefits to being a marine biologist

soothifying-sounds-asmr

Gravity Falls Theme [Handpan] by tokiejoestar

bunjywunjy

Any funky little bat facts, anything is good

mexican long-nosed bats are key pollinators for several species of cactus!

"how do they get the nectar out of the flower, though?" you ask. "maybe with a long tongue, like a butterfly?" well, that's plausible, but INCORRECT.

see, the cactus flowers are actually larger than the bat itself!

so it just kinda. crawls in there.

and in the process gets just SO covered with pollen. absolutely lost in the sauce.

which of course, they smear all over the flowers of the next cactus over when they repeat the process. isn't biology beautiful?

headspace-hotel

Powdered like a DONUT

headspace-hotel

Recently my post on pre-Cambrian life forms has been popular, so i thought y’all might like

more Unknowable Eldritch Life History content

So...before the Cambrian explosion, where many of the animal phyla we know and love today originated, there was...the Ediacaran biota.

You may have heard that the earliest multicellular animals were crawly things a little like worms, or maybe sponges or anemones, or other basic, familiar, boring squishy things.

But those comfortably boring images of squishy worms and sponges on the primordial seafloor? LIES.

The truth is...much less comforting.

Described by scientists with words such as “problematic,” “enigmatic,” “unclear,” and other academic renderings of the sentiment “Hey what the FUCK,” the fossils uncovered from before the Cambrian are a window into a period of life so alien the vocabulary to describe it doesn’t exist.

These things weren’t worms or sponges or anemones, because those things weren’t invented yet. In many cases we don’t know if they were animals, fungi, protists, or something else, and it’s been hypothesized that some of them aren’t any of those things because animals, fungi, and protists weren’t invented yet.

One hypothesis is that some Ediacaran organisms represent stem groups to modern categories of organisms—impossibly ancient ancestors of things recognizable as “animals” or “fungi.” Another possibility is that they belong to extinct “intermediate” branches between plants, animals, and other kingdoms as we understand them.

In my earlier post I referenced Eoandromeda, Haootia, Thectardis, and Namacalathus. I’m delighted to tell you that it only gets weirder from there. This was before the invention of “heads” and “limbs,” foolish mortal.

Instead, we had...Bag And/Or Tower with Sticks

Somebody’s Backbone Just Sitting There. Corumbella is described as a predator in its wikipedia article, and this is...not elaborated upon. THANKS.

“It superficially resembles a compressed cabbage in appearance, although in reality it had a more intricate, fractal mode of organisation.”

Abyssal Tree. Parviscopa is described as potentially being a juvenile of another species in its Wikipedia article. Okay. Let me process the concept of “juvenile” as it relates to something like this.

Donut (critically, the genus name is Obamus, after Obama.)

???????

The article descriptions of these life forms really just highlight how limited language is, how pathetically dependent we are upon familiarity and common understanding to make sense of anything. We struggle to intelligibly describe them because no living comparisons for them exist.

Can you picture this in your head? Yeah, me neither. And it grows by adding segments to...both ends?

...And...doesn’t have a digestive system. Or any organs at all. Cool. That’s cool. I’m fine thanks.

Scientists think maybe it photosynthesized, but also maybe that it might be a version of cnidarian (jellyfish or anemone-related organism), which really summarizes our level of understanding of what it was.

By the way, the seeming lack of a means of obtaining sustenance in many of these creatures is kind of a problem. It is so with the rangeomorphs, a group of sessile, frond-like creatures (including our pal up there, Abyssal Tree) that look like plants, believed to be ancestors of either animals or fungi, and the erniettomorphs. Some scientists speculate that they directly filtered nutrients out of seawater by osmosis. Maybe. They had to do something, presumably.

These are not sci-fi space aliens, they were and are all objectively real living things that lived on Earth just like us. And little as a deep sea marine tube worm or a sponge cares for human affairs, these things are so much less connected to us than even those creatures. They would never meet even the vaguest analog of a vertebrate. They didn’t know what leaves or fish were and didn’t care. We don’t understand them and maybe we never will.

Okay just. Imagine you’re just...vibing deep in a cave somewhere, looking at the rocks, alone in the dark, and you point your flashlight at the cave wall

and you see this.

What you are looking at is the 550 million year old remnant of a real, unknowable living creature. It is older than limbs, older than eyes, older than everything you could use to explain yourself to it, and you’re seeing it.

Contemplate that. Contemplate the fact that you are just a weird evolutionary offshoot of some creature that fucked around and decided a notochord was a good idea.

You’re breathing and moving, but that was not inevitable. It’s just another thing that evolution is trying out for a little while.

You’re seeing it. What does that mean? What are you, next to it? What are you doing, wandering around up there in the air? You have holes! You aren’t fixed to the ground! You’ve developed organs sensitive to light and sound, and you’ve gathered them up at one end of your body!

How does the sunlight taste? What do you see? What is “seeing?”

hopeful-trekkie-deactivated2022

James T. Kirk:

-Graduated in the top 4% of his year -was bullied by jocks -Is a history nerd -was so much of a teacher’s pet that he cheated on an exam and was commended for it -Was referred to as “a stack of books with legs”

Jean-Luc Picard:

-Spent all his free time drinking in pubs and playing billiards -broke more hearts than he can remember -started a bar fight that ended up in him being stabbed in the heart -likes to explore dangerous ruins of ancient civilizations for fun -wouldn’t even have become a starship captain if he wasn’t this much of a hothead

And yet people still manage to get it backwards???

kalinara

I think it’s a problem of First Officer, really.

Jim Kirk seems like a wild man because he’s standing next to calm, logical Spock.*

Meanwhile, Picard seems stately and dignified because he’s standing next to Will “Any alien physiology is bangable if you just put some thought into it” Riker*.

* Of course THEN, we get to the next layer, which is that Spock is the dude who told the Vulcan Science Academy to fuck itself, while Riker plays the trombone.

The Federation is a confusing place.

hunterinabrowncoat

So like I get that people have this issue with Star Trek taking so long to have a canonically queer principle character, and I get that people kind of take issue with there being a sort of ‘qualifier’ on Jadzia/Lenara as they were husband and wife in their previous lives, but I also feel like a lot of people don’t appreciate how incredible this story was?

The Jadzia/Lenara story revolved around two characters who were forbidden from being together by the taboos and laws of their culture. And it wasn’t just a metaphor - they actually used two women. This is a queer story about two women who aren’t allowed to be together because of their cultural norms. Any signs of affection between them were seen as inherently wrong, risky, dangerous etc. Lenara works under the constant, watchful eye of her brother, who continually makes his opinion about his ~concern~ for her known. And eventually Jadzia has to choose between the woman she loves and the life she wants because she won’t be allowed to have both - if she begins a relationship with this woman, her life as she knows it is over and shew ill be ostracized from her society, never allowed to re-enter it. And every moment of it is believable and full of beautifully painful affection…

In 1995 they shamelessly presented a wlw love story complete with longing, affectionate looks, confessions of love, and kisses. And like Kira Nerys says “I don’t understand how two people who’ve fallen in love and made a life together can be forced to walk away from each other because of a taboo!” Like… they weren’t be subtle about this at all.

As for the “qualifier” that somehow makes it less queer….? These two people carry the memories of a man and woman who used to be married, so I guess a lot of people saw this story as a second-hand het love story, but to me that was a really important part of the story because it presented this wlw relationship as totally equal to a het marriage. Their love is intense, believable, and on par with a male/female relationship.

penrosesun

Also, choosing to see this as somehow a second-hand het love story is, quite bluntly, transphobia.

There are tremendously unsubtle trans implications throughout Dax’s entire character arc, complete with multiple scenes that handle deadnaming and pronouns. For many trans people who grew up with Star Trek, the Trills in general, but especially in DS9 were a revelation. Dax is a character who everyone acknowledges once was a man, and who everyone also acknowledges is now a woman. That’s huge, and it needs to not be erased in the conversation about wlw representation in Star Trek in general.

A woman wanting to be together romantically with another woman is not het, regardless of whether one of them was once a man. That’s true whether the women are real or fictional. End of fucking story.

sew-birb

This episode is a genuine love story between two women, and especially when compared to the first ever episode with a Trill in it - a TNG episode where Beverly falls in love with a Trill and breaks up with them when they take a female host instead of a male one, when she’d previously been able to get over the Trill passing to Riker as an intermediate host and continue the relationship - it’s a revelation.

The fact that its a tragic love story is less than ideal, but for 1995 it’s incredible it was broadcast.

jeshala

Yeah, but it WASN’T tragic. It was sad, star crossed, all that, but not tragic. EVERYONE LIVED, but society was too much for one of them. But neither party died.

That was pretty cool to see as a kid.