Author/illustrator Trung Le Nguyen has been live posting reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time on bluesky and just hit the first proposal. The replies are basically the sickos meme
By rolling over and stubbornly feigning sleep if they did.
Their brains are little cause-effect engines. If standing next to your face and yelling until you feed them doesn't actually produce that result, they'll eventually stop doing it. You just have to outlast them.
So, we tried doing this with a cat we were looking after. We would not get up until the alarm clock went off.
One morning, he was standing by my head and screaming, but not in my ear. I looked up and saw that he had his little face one inch from the alarm clock. Because we only woke up when the alarm clock went off, he decided that it was the alarm clock that he needed to scream at until it woke up.
Having seen some births now i can say that dog birth is amazing cos they just slip n slide out one after the other like a little conveyor belt. And theyre so little and unformed. And then UNGULATE BIRTHS ... are amazing for the opposite reason which is that 10mins after being born they are filing their taxes. Unless they are goats, in which case they are committing tax fraud instead
Goats are what is called a precocial species, which means that shortly after birth they are able to do many thimgs on their own, such as standing, walking, eating, and embezzlement
So, Cheeseburger died on November 21st after an unfairly short battle with an unfairly rare cancer that is rarely seen in cats. I only got to spend a month with him after his diagnosis, and losing him has been the greatest heartbreak of my entire life so far. He was my best friend and my soul cat, and he was there for me when I was completely alone, for twelve long years.
I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.
I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.
Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.
Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.
ok sorry to double reblog BUT I just looked him up and he does these fantastic videos where he breaks down HOW he actually mimics the other artists’ styles. Like for ed Sheeran, he explains how he brings his voice forward in the mouth, while Adam Levine sings in the back of the mouth, stuff like that. It’s SO COOL, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually break down how to do this sort of thing, as a skill, instead of just treating it like a neat trick they just happen to be good at.
https://www.tiktok.com/@justinjmooremusic
i keep using 'blorbo' to refer to my own OCs to the point i forget its supposed to be a fandom term. yeah i know blorbo from my shows. and those shows? only airing inside my own brain and the dms of a few lucky friends, baby.
“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.”
— Matthew Walker PhD, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
(via themedicalstate)
“You feel the bulge in his pants” - implies that you are feeling some guy’s penis, may be sexy depending on context
“You feel the bugle in his pants” - implies that this guy has a military horn in his pants, invites confusing questions like why does he have that and how big are his pockets
i dont consider myself a 'fashion guru' by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo' vs 'boot cut' or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping
this also goes for aesthetic or -core titles. 'y2k tank top' is going to get you resellers and fast fashion brands advertising to people looking to meet a current trend. 'thin strap crop tank top' is going to get you a diverse group of results and not upcharge you to hell and back
additionally, shop second hand when you can, second hand and thrift sites typically organize clothes by the cut and color. theyll be more affordable than a depop seller curating you a style to sell you
a trend I've noticed is that when the right-wing culture warriors fixate on something as the latest boogeyman affront to western civilization or whatever, and flood the internet with their dumbass takes about how it flopped because it's woke (even when it's not, like, even woker-than-average) that well-meaning people will try and argue against them, but lack the conviction and confidence to actually say anyone else is wrong in matters of taste, so what they land on is "you're right that it sucks but that isn't bad! how come white men can have a million books/movies/games that are Just Okay or even kinda Suck, and they're not good but they're fun and dumb and people enjoy them, but [minority group] can't?"
And like. I've gotten myself in trouble for this kind of opinion before, but, that kind of behavior can be kinda pathetic. You do not need to find a middle ground between your actual opinion and the diametrically opposed one. You have every right to actually disagree with people, and nobody deserves to be thought of as Wrong than people who complain about "wokeness" in movies
Like, I'm gonna use the Supergirl movie as an example here because it's the movie that applies that I've seen most recently, but be aware this is just for illustrative purposes, the post is "about" a wider trend in moviegoer discourse
So like. I saw "Supergirl." It was good! Strong performances by the leads, a first act that introduces a cast of compelling and easy-to-root-for characters, establishes tone and stakes and a clear visual language. The jokes mostly evoked laughs, the sad moments jerked all the right tears, the big "shocker" moments in the ending felt earned, and the emotional beats largely landed the way the filmmakers intended. Having read the source material, it was a largely faithful, if not 1:1, adaptation. The changes they made, made sense to make the story work in the medium. The scenes containing Supergirl's plucky teen friend were stolen by the plucky teen actress who played her, and we should all watch that actress's career because it's clearly going places. Jason Momoa did the character of Lobo justice, although personally I still don't think he's the best to ever play him.
Despite the fact that the main character was introduced in a previous installment in a wider franchise and will appear in the next installment, the story was almost entirely self-contained. You don't have a meaningfully different experience watching it depending on whether or not you've seen "Superman," and other than the main character being alive and available to appear in Superman Two at the end of the movie, there are no apparent easter eggs or teases for future installments. It is interested in being a movie. It is not interested in being a commercial for future episodes of a semiannual TV show you have to go to a movie theater to watch.
I'm not just a delusionally brand-loyal DC fan, either, I have my criticisms. The final battle went on a little long and was a bit reliant on CGI, and I wish they'd done the Salem The Cat thing with Krypto and had him be played by a real living dog in scenes that don't require him to be doing Superman shit that only a CGI dog can do. Krypto and Kara spend many scenes of the movie without powers, there's no reason he should be a CGI dog in those scenes. I had similar complaints about Superman, but they didn't outweigh my appreciation of either movie.
The only "woke" things about it were that the stars were women and one of them was a woman of color. I actually thought it could've stood to be Woker, but I think that about many movies. Make someone textually bisexual for no reason, I beg
I say all this mostly to demonstrate that I've put actual thought into my "the movie is good" take. I'm not just saying "must a movie be good? It was Fun and that's what matters," I actually think a movie needs to be more than Fun to be good. I think this one was Good. I can name several better movies, and a LOT of worse ones, in the genre, off the top of my head, but my honest and genuine opinion is that it was a good movie.
So I find it kinda insufferable going into the tags and seeing a million people basically making the far-right talking point of "the movie was bad and people only liked it because they felt they had to because it's a Woman Movie, but at least Milly Alcock is hot and I was entertained by the bright colors and moving images." If you think the movie is genuinely bad, that's fine, I disagree but I respect everyone's right to be wrong about one thing in life. But you don't need to do this whole cowardly "yeah it's bad but I liked ittt, can't women have entertaining slop too?" shtick for the benefit of, like, Nazis on twitter and the people who continue to inexplicably treat them as tastemakers
Abstract. Evolution has produced an astonishing array of organisms, but does it have limits and, if so, how are these overcome and how have
An interesting paper (Vermeij, 2015) on the "empty phenotypic space", i.e. the forms and adaptations that we do not see in the living world, possibly relevant to the convergence vs. contingency debate.
Some examples:
Wheels: some curled-up arthropods can roll around, and bacterial flagella and some parts of weevil legs rotate on their axis, but macroscopic wheels with a free axle do not exist, probably because smooth surfaces on which they'd be useful are rare and it would be difficult to grow them through embryonal development.
Animal-provided pollination and dispersal do not exist in water, with the possible exception of one species of fish-pollinated seagrass (which is a descendant of terrestrial plants). Presumably water is already good enough at carrying gametes and propagules that buying the services of an animal is a useless expense.
Mineral reef-building does not occur on land nor, more surprisingly, in freshwater. The reason for the latter is not clear, since there are enough mineral ions in freshwater to build shells. Boring of rock, shells, and wood in freshwater is also extremely rare though common in the sea.
Gelatinous plankton like salps or jellyfish (with few exceptions of the latter) is also not found in freshwater, probably because they can't survive dispersal between separate water bodies.
Endothermy ("warm blood") is generally not found in small aquatic animal, probably because water leeches away heat much faster than water, so aquatic endotherms (tunas, sharks, seals, whales) need to be bulky. On land, however, endothermy is found among tiny vertebrates and even insects.
There is no passive air-floating plankton, since air is not dense enough to support living tissue or dissolved organic matter by buoyancy. For that reason filter-feeding is also rare outside of water, while carnivorous plants are not found in the ocean (the water already carries enough nutrient). Aquatic plants do not produce wood as buoyancy is enough to keep them upright.
Large terrestrial animals do not specialize as scavengers (all mammals famous for scavenging also hunt actively); large carcasses are too spread out. All specialist scavengers on land are either very small, or flying.
Herbivory is rare among active fliers, because plant matter has a low energy density and takes a long time to digest. Herbivorous birds and insects are poor fliers or flightless, and the best fliers, like geese, are the ones that can take shelter in water.
Many more examples are only excluded from specific groups (e.g. live-bearing, despite being very common in reptiles, never appeared in birds, probably because the bird egg-shell is too mineralized to be retained in the womb as transition toward full live-bearing).
Even though the author calls them "forbidden phenotypes", only some of them are actually impossible (because they cannot evolve in the first place, or because they cost more energy than they're worth), and others simply never happened to evolve. At the end of the paper there is a list of phenotypes that would have been "forbidden" in the aftermath of the Cambrian Explosion and Ordovician diversification, but which appeared later, and they include
cutins, suberins, lignins, flavonoids, alkaloids, vascular systems, roots, leaves, rigid frameworks of stems and branches, nutrition complemented by animal matter, and basal growth in land plants; nitrogen-fixing symbiosis on land; animal-mediated dispersal/pollination; silk-producing, sound-emitting, flying, eusocial, terrestrial herbivorous, wood-boring, terrestrial shell-bearing and endothermic animals; embryos nourished within the body of an animal or plant parent; mineralized phytoplankton; and rock-excavating marine herbivores. [...] photosymbiotic and chemosymbiotic molluscs, the bivalved condition in gastropods, terrestrial life in gastropods and vertebrates, complex septa within the phragmocone of externally shelled cephalopods, internalization and loss of the shell in cephalopods, cementation to the substratum with a glue of calcium carbonate and organic matrix in several animal groups (gastropods, brachiopods, bivalves and barnacles), spines on shells of several groups (brachiopods, bivalves and brachiopods), mineralized tubes in polychaete annelids, mobility in bryozoans and pelmatozoan echinoderms, jaws and teeth in vertebrates, and vascular systems in brown and red algae. A vast diversity of potent venoms also lay in the future as part of the defensive and aggressive arsenal of many gastropods, cephalopods, aculeate Hymenoptera, vertebrates and land plants.
He also mentions phenotypes that were lost, but every listed adaptation seems to have survived in some group (e.g. complex spiny shells disappeared among cephalopods but survived in gastropods).
It’s funny because this scene must be based on the memoir Special Agent by Candis DeLong. In it she describes being out looking at clothes at a department store on lunch break with another female agent and overhearing a conversation between a man and a woman in which he says he’s an FBI agent. They peer around some clothes racks thinking that they’re going to see one of their fellow agents trying to get a date, and when they don’t recognize the guy they go over and pretend to be interested in the big strong FBI agent themselves and ask to see his badge. The guy actually pulled out a fake badge, whereupon they said “Huh, that doesn’t look anything like ours…”, produced their own badges and arrested him for impersonating an FBI agent. (I remember this bit from a 25 year old book because I actually stole it myself for a fic)
im so sick of unnecessary dinner scenes in movies 😡 every fucking movie they just want to titillate you with some food because they think you’re a dumb animal who just wants to see mashed potatoes bouncing. if its an IMPORTANT dinner scene where they explain lore then whatever i understand. but they shove useless meals into every movie these days and its disgusting
yall are so fucking weird about gnc people. a woman wears a suit and she's "conforming to the patriarchy". a man wears a skirt and he's Secretly A Trans Egg. have you considered It's Fabric
I once said something along the lines of "why does everyone assume that every gnc cis man is an egg" and was harassed for it and sarcastically told that obviously the treatment of cis men should be our biggest concern and that I didn't know anything about egg culture (I do). You do realize that gnc people are queer too, right? You realize I can concern myself with "smaller" problems, because I love gnc people and am concerned about their well-being? You realize that telling people they must be trans because of their presentation is just as bad as telling someone must be cis for the same reasons?
I'm never going to shut up about how shitty the queer community treats gender non-conforming people, especially gender non-conforming men.
also the treatment of gnc cis men tells me a lot about how you'd treat gnc trans men. like, you think that if a man likes feminine clothing he's secretly a woman? do you know how many people have told me i'm not "actually trans" because i like feminine clothing? stop reinforcing gender norms i am Begging
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