The Little Things That Make The World Go Round

An ode to the countless tiny living things that make the world tic. And some pharmercy, a few other things, etc.

[encryptidarchivist]

i love lowland streaked tenrecs because they’re like if a mammal was a caterpillar

[encryptidarchivist]

look at this thing. the animal

[rederiswrites]

Wow. Wikipedia image not any less mammal that is caterpillar.

[footlongdingledong]

idk man not to sound like a cartoon hippie but if your entirrrrre blog and dash is about how the world sucks and everyones bigoted i think you are going to give yorself brain worms

[footlongdingledong]

"ah but all of this is important and true and if i dont reblog all of this important stuff waga baga THE WORMS! THATS WORMS! THE BRAIN WORMS!

[footlongdingledong]

i do not think you are doing activism chief i think what you are doing is sitting in your room flagellating yourself expecting something to happen

[podcastwizard]

LIKES TO CHARGE REBLOGS TO CAST

[the-goddess-of-annoying]

you people aren't CASTING

[the-goddess-of-annoying]

NO

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[genderkoolaid]

Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.

[cherrispryte]

Some added 101-level context from someone (me) who’s worked in federal grantmaking for 20 years and is literally certified on this document - this is a document that governs all federal grantmaking. It’s been around for over a decade and is a mega-document that combine multiple previous smaller documents that have been around for ages. It is updated every few years and generally the updates are minor - a notable change in the previous update was raising the small procurement threshold from $10,000 to $15,000 for example. Deeply dry boring minutiae that no one outside of federal grantmakers need concern themselves with. It was also federal GUIDELINES, which means there was flexibility.

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

So yes, please comment. You don’t have to read all 400 pages before doing so, it’s dry and dense as fuck, but I thought this information might be helpful. Also, while there is a public comment period, this isn’t voted on by Congress. The OMB just fucking issues it. Pressuring your elected officials into publicly saying “hey what the fuck are you doing here” is good, though.

[mikkeneko]

Please note the comment period is open through JULY 13th, not JUNE 13th. I saw a lot of relogs yesterday saying "last day!" and I just want to say it is very much not too late.

[grison-in-space]

As of today, 7/8/26, we have five days for public commentary on this to go through. I am begging y'all: if you care about independent science in the country that produces the most global science funding in the world, please leave a comment.

[bogleech]

Do people even know how casually and pervasively U.S. christians believe actual witchcraft and demons are a tangible everyday threat? Because it should be horrifying that these people just walk around thinking that way.

This isn't harmless religious freedom, it's an untreated ongoing mass hysteria dangerous enough that these people have zero business ever touching any form of educational work, medical work, law enforcement or politics and yet they outright dominate those last two. Your local state senators quite possibly think little goblins from hell are as real as like, seagulls. And they think you're possesed and brainwashed under their* influence for not agreeing with them.

*the demons, not the seagulls...but maybe?

[bugbraiin]

One thing im uncomfortably woke about is bugs. And im actively trying to get more uncomfortably woke. By this i mean i DO believe the normalised fear of bugs stems from both government and business propaganda. The start of household pesticide sales coinciding with the boom in insect related horror movies. The promotion of anti intellectualism and anti enviromentalism. If you're scared of bugs, you wont care about saving them. If you dont care about saving them, you wont care about saving our home, since without bugs it cannot be saved. If you dont care about saving our home, the rich can do whatever they want with the chunks of it they continue to destroy.

I WILL calmly and kindly try to help anyone who is afraid of bugs. I will show them my finds, i will explain their importance, i will tell them just how sweet and gentle and friendly they are. And I WILL shoot down any immature loser who believes senseless killing is the only possible response to not liking something.

Get woke. Love bugs.

EDIT: this breached containment. My usual like count is like 5 😭 i want to clarify i mean people who conflate fear with hate are the ones who wont care about saving our planet, like people who threaten to kill peoples pet bugs or actively kill bugs outside for no apparent reason. Not people who run away from a bee.

[gaslit-dipshits]

[appalachian-werewolf]

PoweredByWho — Who's Building Data Centers in Your Backyard?

Follow the money behind America's data center boom. Track 2,300+ projects, PAC spending, and the politicians who sign off on it.

[reasonsforhope]

Reasons for hope: Lots of amazing people did a ton of work to make this fantastic, fully interactive resource available - because no matter how bleak things seem, there are millions, and millions of people doing everything they can to protect both the world and their own communities.

You can use this to view and subscribe to updates, project statuses, and for at least some of them even whole dossiers. This is an amazing resource, I highly recommend checking it out

[headspace-hotel]

IDK about other places, but a ton of cities in Kentucky have preemptively banned data centers from being built

This is really the one issue that unites people on all sides of the political spectrum.

[literallymechanical]

The problem with using "guns aren't cool" and "guns aren't toys" as part of your gun control messaging is that guns are very obviously cool toys and everybody knows this. People go to shooting ranges or shoot cans in the woods for the same reason they play golf or Magic the gathering. It's playing toys!! Dangerous toys, but still toys.

And when you include blatant falsehoods in your messaging, now nobody believes you when you talk statistics on gun use in domestic violence or other serious issues.

Maybe I'm an outlier in the pro gun control group, because I'm a MechE and I love machines that perform a precise function with clever bits of steel, and i went to a summer camp when i was 11 or 12 where they had a shooting range with dinky little .22 rifles, but like

I can't be the only one who understands this, right?

[literallymechanical]

"Guns aren't cool toys" -> obvious nonsense to millions of people, just a statement so embarrassingly false that it weakens the rest of your argument

"Guns shouldn't be cool toys" -> a statement that a lot of people will disagree with, but it's a self-consistent point of view that a person could reasonably have and argue for

[great-and-small]

do you have any Florida flavored hope?

1. Although sea turtles face enormous challenges in our current world, the rules and regulations designed to protect them here in Florida do seem to be helping. Green sea turtle nests in Florida increased from ~4,000 nests in the 1980s to over 230,000 in the 2010s. (Source)

2. Endangered smalltooth sawfish had a really bad few years due to a mysterious illness, but the most recent studies suggest the species is recovering and the old nurseries in the Indian River Lagoon are filled with baby sawfish (Source)

3. Our North Atlantic Right Whales had a great calving season this year, with the highest number of calves recorded in twenty years! (Source)

4. The passing of the State Parks Preservation Act and the Conservation Lands Bill represent a huge win for wildlife in the state! This legislation strengthens protections for state parks and wildlife management areas, which will hopefully make it much harder for certain scumbag real estate groups and politicians to secretly “swap” (aka steal) public lands for development. (Source)

[the-supernatural-atheist]

if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills

[the-supernatural-atheist]

where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*

[makaeru]

I hate learning about instances of "oh yeah we know how to do that, we just don't".

[marzipanandminutiae]

this is exactly why I love talking about historical passive heating and cooling techniques

oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?

and we're still building them?

while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?

uh. okay then

(also public transit. the history of public transit in the US is infuriating, because we had it! and then we destroyed it!)

[headspace-hotel]

THIS IS SO TRUE

[little-grey-dowitcher]

So many people never learned to live with harmless discomfort at any point in their lives and holy fuck does it show

[little-grey-dowitcher]

“But I wanna know!” You’re gonna have to learn to be ok with not knowing some things, especially when those things involve personal details about strangers that they’re not comfortable sharing.

“But it’s confusing!” If you take the time to educate yourself it’ll no longer be confusing. Otherwise you’re just gonna have to learn to be ok with being confused.

“But it’s weird!” You probably do weird things all the time. Everyone does weird things sometimes. Life goes on.

“But it scares me!” Is it hurting you? No? You’ll be fine. Being scared and being harmed are not always the same thing. Learn to tell the difference and then act accordingly.

“But I want it!” And I want a million dollars. You can’t always get what you want.

[little-grey-dowitcher]

A lot of people were also never told “no” as children and the consequences of that manifest in similar ways. Learn to be ok with being told “no.” You’re not gonna die if you don’t get your way in every single situation ever.

[fox-bright]

hi any life advice for 21yo

Don't date thirty-year-olds until you are at least 25.

Having a glass of water for every glass of alcohol will give you a 50% reduction in hangover viciousness.

Bad people will use your willingness to be quiet as a weapon against you. If someone's being awful to you and trusting you'll be quiet to keep from making waves, surprise them.

There is no physical object in the world that is worth as much as your honor.

Honor is not the same as dignity. Retaining one sometimes means leaving the other aside.

Don't have any sex you don't want to have; have as much as you want of the sex that you do, whether that's a lot, a little, or none at all. Nothing you can do to your own body is immoral, unless you're doing it as an act of self-punishment.

Food is morally neutral. You do not have to earn the right to eat calories. Fat and sugar keep your brain from eating itself.

Learning to sit still and breathe--in, in, in, hold, hold, hold, out, out, out, out, out, out--can give you five feet of clear space around yourself in a maelstrom.

Find out how to make three good meals: A comfort meal you can make for just yourself relatively easily, a fancy meal you can use to wow a date, and a meal you can feed a bunch of people. All the other cooking can come later, but you can build a community on those three meals.

If you ever get to the point that things are so bleak you can see no other way forward but to die, make any other choice. If that means leaving everything you own and being a beach bum, or quitting your career, or taking up or leaving a religion, or deciding to bicycle across the country, so be it; living means more chances, dying means everything stops and you don't get to see any more interesting things. As you have not yet seen all the things that can interest you, it is better to live.

[josephbrassey]

“Haha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.”

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.

[gudamor]

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day

[onion-souls]

[mckitterick]

I wonder if this is relevant to the story:

source post: X

why isn't this huge on the regular news? I went searching for a text source, but it's only videos on MSN and such so far

[amorphoussystem-deactivated2024]

How much longer until the utopic Solarpunk future where Capitalism is dead and we all live in ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities? Asking for a friend.

[plantyhamchuk]

Until we make those ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities ourselves. It’s going to take a lot of us to do it though, so best to spread the word (and gather native tree seeds).

[samiholloway]

And, like, get started now. Then our “weirdo houses” will be the only thing functioning when everything falls apart!

[plantyhamchuk]

The only reason why we don’t live in a solarpunk world right now is because no one has bothered to make it yet. 

We’ll have to make it ourselves, and we’ll have to help each other make it. That’s why it is solarpunk. 

Some resources to consider creating or joining or doing:

Repair cafes - create or join your local repair cafe! Repair stuff, learn how to repair stuff, teach others how to repair stuff.

Map of Makerspaces - make some things! learn how to make some things! teach others how to make some things!

Community Garden Map (note that this is US-only, and not a complete list) - join a local community garden

Support your local farmers / local economy (US only link)

Support or create a local Food Not Bombs chapter

Support or create a local Food Not Lawns chapter

Grow food in 5 gallon buckets

Volunteer for Habitat for Humanity (as a bonus you can learn extremely practical skills)

Volunteer via 350.org to help the environment / the planet / the place we live and depend on

Excellent-and-still-growing wiki from reddit’s awesome r/zerowaste community - great resource to learn how to live more lightly on the earth

Spread the word about solarpunk, especially to engineering students. Show them projects like Open Source Ecology - Global Village Construction Set and Bridges for Prosperity 

Learn how to Patch a Hole, Mend a Seam, and Fix a Hem

Learn how to repair a hole in the sole of a shoe

Learn some basics on passive solar design - clever use of the sun can create extremely energy efficient homes and buildings. You can use these principles to save on energy bills, even if you’re renting.

Free USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning, 2015 revision - cut down on personal food waste! Learn how to safely preserve food. Very useful if you suddenly harvest / purchase for crazy cheap in season / dumpster dive a ton of perishable food.

Donate to One Acre Fund, which provides training and capital to farmers (making them more productive and pulling them out of poverty) in various east African countries

Donate to Bridges to Prosperity, which provides technical expertise, money, and volunteers, to help local people build and maintain their own footbridges in extremely isolated rural areas 

joining r/solarpunk, and sharing links/ideas/art/music with the community. Also, upvoting stuff for greater visibility. There’s over 900 members!

[anarchopuppy]

Adding a few!

Replant scraps from your produce

Graft fruit-bearing branches onto ornamental trees in your area

Turn plastic waste into pretty much any plastic thing you need, in your garage, with machines built out of cheap and accessible parts

Make your own paper out of recycled paper or cardboard

Build a composter or a wormery

Harvest rainwater

Mod your toilet to flush gray water (used sink/shower water, or even that rainwater you’re harvesting)

Build a solar collector on the cheap

Build a wind turbine on the cheap

Build a hydroelectric water wheel on the cheap

Get internet access without going through cable companies using cheap, low-tech equipment

Make your own beer, cheese, soap, wine… really anything you can make rather than buy is a success!

And HELP YOUR NEIGHBORS! Don’t just build/grow/mod/repair your own stuff, help them do it too! Share it! Depend on each other! Work together and grow closer with your community!

[longzone222]

Visit Original Link

[worldheritageposts-official]

World Heritage Post

[thetetra]

I managed to listen to exactly 3 seconds of this before I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe.

[udunie]

Actually, I have to say a bit more about the Hungarian elections. Even tho I know the hype is mostly died down now. Many people posted about it, about how it's just about going out and voting and it's all just kumbaya from there (also including my post from the night of the election) but that is not actually true.

There were many factors that played into this landslide victory, that would probably be hard to replicate in other countries, but I will still lay it out, in case this is useful to anyone in countries in similar situations.

Péter Magyar was an insider

He was a Fidesz (Orbán's party) insider, he is actually the ex-husband of a former minister, though he didn't hold any prominent positions before. This is important, because it made it a lot harder for the government to get an angle on him. They couldn't really say that he's a buffoon or corrupt or any other shit they smeared the 'traditional' opposition with, because that would all come back to them.

And this means that you can't let someone's background cloud your vision. You have to listen, even if you don't like where they came from.

2. He was extremely tight lipped about important issues during the campaign

Hungary is a relatively conservative country. That doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people with leftist values, but - especially after 16 years of constant conservative propaganda poisoning society against progressive values - you just can't get wide support if you get caught up in hot-button issues. Let's take Pride for example. Orbán tried to ban Budapest Pride after a long anti-LGBT campaign, and Magyar got a lot of criticism from opposition media for not taking a stand on the issue, even after the Pride was held despite the ban - and was the largest Pride in my country's history.

LGBT issues are important to me, and they are important to a lot of left leaning people, but the reality is that it's not important to (or are even negatively viewed by) a large part of the population.

In most countries - ESPECIALLY when people in power turned LGBT rights into a poisoned pill - you can't win an election if you get 'branded' with being a SJW. And yeah, it made my hackles rise that he didn't give a clear answer about it, only that under his leadership everyone in the country would have the right to protest and right to assembly.

Was that enough? No. Was that more than what we got from Orbán? Yes.

It was only an incrementally better stance than Orbán's, but it WAS better.

3. Magyar put huge emphasis on rural voters and on getting national symbols back from the far right

The opposition of most authoritarians is concentrated in urban areas. It's much easier to develop more progressive leaning values if you are constantly exposed to people of different cultures and lifestyles than your own, but that is not the case in rural areas, especially if the government has huge media presence that feeds more isolated people fear and propaganda.

Péter Magyar went on a giant campaign, holding civic meetings in sometimes bigger, sometimes tiny towns. He wasn't afraid to get close to people. Much of his first such campaigns was largely spent with him talking to people from the back of a pickup (hastily spraypainted our national colors) and answering their questions directly.

Like, literally.

He met hundreds of thousands of voters face-to-face.

By the end of his campaign, he held up to four or five such meetings a day all over the country. He'd been in bigger cities multiple times, he'd been in every voting district. His last tour had more than 500 stops. And this is a tiny country.

What I want to say with this is that, you can't do this without a) putting in the fucking work, and b) leaving the population centers, where your supporters already are.

He and his team also had a very good sense for marketing shit. In pretty much every country I know of, the far right is always fucking appropriating national/folk symbolism, and they'd been great about claiming them back, and giving people a common ground. Like his party's theme song is a very popular Hungarian folk song. That sort of shit.

4. Top notch investigative journalism

Péter Magyar's whole bid for power started with a scandal that came from investigative journalists. The details are not important now, but one of the 'pawns' that Orbán decided to sacrifice to calm the public was Magyar's ex-wife. That was what started this whole thing, what made him turn against his former community. And during the last years - and especially during the last weeks before the election - the remaining independent media kept coming out with more and more major scandals. You have to keep supporting independent media, or the opportunity may never come to change your government.

I could go on for a lot longer, but tumblr is telling me that this post is getting too long lol. Anyway.

My general point still stands. If your house is on fire, you can’t be like ‘well that’s not the fireman I imagined’. Even if it's a bit more complex than that.