cats + coffee @thefantasticone - Tumblr Blog

hikes are very good yes but a deluxe hike is when you are accompanied by a freak with niche nature knowledge. they’re like omg stop there’s a horned valerian varmint beetle here and then you both get to crouch down and look at a bug like :)

markscherz

Bonus: you don’t have to cover a lot of ground. I can turn a three kilometre walk into a three hour adventure. Five if there is a small rocky stream or a few ponds.

picsthatmakeyougohmm

pangur-and-grim

trying to couch nap but they’re observing me

madicham

I wanted to draw them

my-artblog-is-ssjumi

their shapes are compelling

thyrell

magicratfingers

not100bees

I know that Ea-nasir is like a meme these days but it is wild that we have complaint letters from 1750 BC. That's over three thousand years before the release of Belgian techno anthem "Pump Up the Jam".

iamheavymeta-lll

kangarookawaii

shwoing of her grub

#hergrub

velvet-jellyfish

If you get into white work embroidery, you might discover cutwork. And when you start doing cutwork, you might get curious about incorporating detached elements. And before you know it the fabric is gone, you are making needle lace, and there goes the rest of your week.

Buttonhole stitch - not even once.

parkchanwoohoo

OP this is gorgeous, holy shit

#only 1 fiber arts hobby challenge: impossible #looks cool af

gallusrostromegalus

Upstairs Kevin Is Actually For Real The World's Most Perfect Betta Fish

So for those of you not familiar with my recent descent into fishkeeping, about 2 months ago a friend of mine who does Hazardous Waste cleanup (specifically cleaning up hazardous places like meth labs) called me up and asked:

"You have fish, right?"

"...Why?" I asked, having become aware that the Fish Distribution System is even more aggressive than the cat one.

"I found a fish in the back of an abandoned trap house. Alive." She clarified.

I could feel my fate settling upon my soul.

"...Send me a pic so I can ID the species and I'll see what I can do."

She sent me a picture of a small purplish squiggle in six inches of fetid green muck. But when I arrived to collect the sludge creature he turned out to look like this:

He's difficult to photograph in focus, but he's a deep wine-dark creature with an iridescent blue sheen. The red patches on his fins mirror where the fins of a Plakat/wild Betta splendens would be, and the rest of his fins are a ghostly shimmering white. This fish was in six inches of toxic green shit.

Naturally, he needed the finest tank I could put together that afternoon.

I think I did alright.

He's so fucking cute. He always swims up to watch when anyone approaches. I've got him trained to do a little dance when I feed him. He likes watching me doing anything in front of his tank.

That's all actually pretty typical of Bettas- they're very intelligent and curious creatures and like learning, which is more than I can say for some of my relatives.

Where Upstairs Kevin (so named because his tank is in my upstairs bathroom) really shines is that a lot of Bettas are... Not sociable. They often eat shrimp, attack other fish in their tank (or get stressed out of they can't commit enough violence to maintain their personal space) or constantly harass and nip the snails in their tanks. Most Bettas are genuinely happier being alone.

Kevin fucking loves his snail (Bluebert) and will shimmy as fast as he can over whenever Bluebert falls off something (it's fine, this is a normal way for mystery snails to get from one place to another).

When I had my Nego D'Aguas in the holding tank, I had to put three of the smallest ones in with him because they were being harassed in the small tank, and he was a perfect gentleman with them. He was trying very hard to shoal with them, but they're very zippy. He was visibly upset (lethargic, dulled colors) when I moved them back to the big tank.

Today was the real acid test: I'm going to move him from his 5 gallon to the 10 gallon so I can use the 5 as a hospital/spare plants tank, and I needed to know if I could have shrimp in with him. Even Betta that are cool with other fish can still see a shrimp and decide they're at the buffet. Unfortunately, there's no real way to know without putting shrimp in with the Betta.

So earlier today, I got half a dozen super-discounted Rilli shrimp (LFS has a massive overstock of them for some reason) and added them to his 5 gallon. There are a bunch of hiding places for shrimp in there and if he was aggressive with them I'd move him to the 10 gallon immediately (I don't want to do that just yet because I need to move the furniture around in there a bit).

Friends.

The shrimp are fully swimming in the open and Kevin is just following them around, curious, but only curious. No gill-flaring, no posturing, no lunges or snapping. Some of them are red, a color that normally triggers aggression in Bettas, and he's just. Hanging out, watching them eat biofilm off the moss. One of them accidentally landed on his head and stayed there for 3 seconds and he only went "???" Until it took off again.

My beautiful and perfect and son who is so kind and gentle with his tiny friends.

gallusrostromegalus

Pictures that are paintings, to me:

They're both so curious about each other.

(Kitty Fishtank Time is closely supervised and the room is closed off when we're not there. The tank also has a heavy glass lid that covers the whole tank and has anti-kitty safety clips)

prokopetz

Wrong: Ada Lovelace invented computer science and immediately tried to use it to cheat at gambling because she was Lord Byron's daughter.

Right: Ada Lovelace invented computer science and immediately tried to use it to cheat at gambling because that was the closest you could get in 1850 to being a Super Mario 64 speedrunner.

bear-disguised-as-a-human

This is how I found out that Ada Lovelace was Lord Byrons daughter

prokopetz

Well, yeah. That's why she received the unusual education which laid the foundation for her later discoveries in the first place. Her mother, Lady Byron, firmly believed three things:

It was her responsibility as a mother to ensure that Ada didn't turn out like her father;

Fundamentally, the thing that was wrong with Lord Byron is that he was a poet; and

The opposite of poetry is math.

Ada Lovelace's biography handily illustrates how well this theory worked out in practice.

arqueete

Hark, a vagrant: 298