yenfers:

“din used to be smart and careful idk why he went on mandalore just like that” you mean the din djarin who knocked himself unconcious against a force barrier because he tried to force it not once, not twice, but three times? the din djarin who went head on to save his son who was not yet his son, from the empire, and didn’t think his escape plan through? din djarin who jumped into a krayt dragon’s mouth hoping for the best, being like “take care of my kid” to the first dude he saw, literally 12 seconds before being swallowed? din djarin who walked straight up into a room full of empire officers, trying to avoid having to show his face from a machine requiring face recognition to work?? din djarin who abandoned his not-yet-son in a bar yoloing into the unknown to find an old rebel fighter, hoping that same rebel fighter wouldn’t kick his ass? din djarin who, all too often, leaves his infant son alone in a spaceship (yknow to the point of said son almost crashed the whole ship more than once)? and that’s just some examples.

(via beatrice-otter)

the mandalorian din djarin chaotic dumbasses Star Wars

dduane:

numberlover1729:

brawltogethernow:

letslipthehounds:

grifalinas:

sashathephoenix:

bailesu:

tanoraqui:

pimpmizziriam:

nudityandnerdery:

darkravn:

garrettauthor:

animate-mush:

uovoc:

katedrawscomics:

hypotheticalwoman:

roachpatrol:

zephyrantha:

aethersea:

nightfoot:

thesummoningdark:

rhys1812:

poorlydescribedpterrybooks:

amatalefay:

poorlydescribedpterrybooks:

tisorridalamor:

Describing Terry Pratchett’s books is difficult. Someone asked me what the book I was reading was about, and I had to tell them it was about banking and the gold standard, but like in a cool way with golems and action. 

 I don’t think they believed me.

welcome to the club

It is so, so difficult to explain to people that your favorite book is about transgender feminist dwarves, Nazi werewolves, and the mystery of a missing piece of really old ritual bread. And Opera saves the day.

yes, give us those sweet, sweet, terrible descriptions

A tortoise who’s really a god, finds an allegory for Jesus and they go on adventures in an ancient greece like place and then a desert 

The chief of police averts a rerun of an ancient war, partially despite and partially because of being possessed by a dying dwarf’s graffiti

It’s like Les Miserables but Javert is the good guy and also there’s time travel.  

Macbeth but it’s about the witches

Chapter one, the protagonist is hanged. Then he’s put in charge of the post office. Yes, in that order.

it’s like mulan if there were way more mulans in mulan and also pratchett is extra irritated that too many people missed the point of jingo

The bureaucrats of the universe get annoyed at the paperwork humanity causes so they decide to steal Christmas.  Replacement Christmas is done by Death and replacement Death is done by goth Mary Poppins, who is also in charge of the investigation.

these are all nice and accurate reasons to read discworld if you haven’t yet

Romeo and Juliet football AU but the other team is wizards

Hollywood????

An entire clan of tattooed, hairy, kleptomaniac, alcoholic Scotsmen decide a little girl is their new best friend whether she wants to be or not and she rescues her absolutely worthless brother by discovering the power of selfishness.

@cosmictwobyfour

Someone is dying, journalism is being invented, and part of Pulp Fiction is going on in the background.

The universes burocrats want to measure everything so they pay a man to imprison time so everything will stop and they can measure things in peace. Goth mary Poppins saves the day, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse is the best Milkman in the world, and chocolate saves the day. Also someone was born twice.

Classic dynastic machinations are happening in fantasy China, to be completely overturned by a gang of elderly barbarian heroes and the world’s worst wizard and best sprinter

Death incarnate battles a shopping cart for the fate of the world.  

@grifalinas

Phantom of the Opera au, except there’s witches, a cookbook that is thinly-veiled pornography, and Christine is played by a fledgeling witch with multiple personalities who can’t stop being sensible long enough to enjoy herself

Hidden heir to the throne decides an cynical, alcoholic cop is the best role model in the world.

Atlantis provides an excuse for a xenophobia-inspired war between Britain and the Middle East but it’s fine because the armies are arrested for conspiracy to cause public nuisance.

the jfk assassination is parodied in the above.

Rain is brought to australia by a lousy wizzard who runs from dropbears, steals a sheep, and invents vegamite

(sigh)(smile) All of the above.

(via dduane)

gnu terry pratchett discworld

dduane:

your-naked-magic-0h-dear-lord:

adarkerbeamoflight:

manofnumbers:

Apologies for the format and need to zoom, but I thought this response was wonderful

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Image is a picture of page 42 from The Sunday Times in the UK (undated). The page is called Style Voice, and the segment is called Dear Dolly, subtitled: “your love, life and friendship dilemmas answered by Dolly Alderton.” At the bottom of the page, there is a note that says “To get your life dilemma answered by Dolly, email or send a voice note to deardolly@sundaytimes.co.uk or DM @theststyle.

Text of the segment reads:

[submission]

Dear Dolly,

I was already a little overweight, but things spiralled during lockdown. As a home-schooling, working-from-home single parent to two children, there was little time for contemplative yoga or solo mini-marathons around the park. After contracting the virus (it dragged on and on) and then not being able to leave our tiny flat much due to the lockdown, the only excitement of the day seemed to be a gin and tonic at 6pm, rounds of Netflix and peanut butter on toast.

I eat when I’m stressed and when I’m bored, and I was very stressed and very bored. And now the buttons are popping off my jeans. My clothes don’t fit, I don’t want to spend a fortune buying pretty new things in “L” when I have to get back to “M.” And how will I ever feel glamorous and attractive again after piling on the pounds and covering my face with a mask? Please help. I don’t want to be single for ever.

[response]

As I read your letter, the first thing I thought was what a challenging time you’ve been through in the past six months. You’ve had to educate, entertain and care for not one but two young children, all day, every day, without the help of a partner, while being mostly confined indoors in a tiny living space. You contracted an illness that was largely unknown and potentially debilitating. All this happened during a time when you couldn’t see friends or extended family, or go to the pub, or go away, or go anywhere for that matter. I want you to read that back and acknowledge what a difficult set of circumstances you’ve been living through recently.

With that in mind, I’m going to present you with a possibility: you haven’t overindulged at all. You haven’t eaten too much, you haven’t messed up a routine. You have been giving yourself exactly what you’ve needed in a time of immense stress – you have been in complete communion with your mind and body. You’ve allowed yourself the gentle anesthesia of a cold gin and tonic after a long day with kids, and restful nights with a comforting and familiar food as you prepare for the following morning. You’ve used your few spare hours to recuperate, instead of flinging yourself around your small flat in front of a YouTube exercise video or making complicated kale salads. All of this makes complete sense. You have not made any mistakes.

A clever thing the diet industry did to the collective consciousness is attach morals to eating: certain foods are bad (peanut butter on toast), certain ways of eating are bad (in front of Netflix). And if we are to believe the fallacy of “you are what you eat,” every time we put food in our mouths, we give ourselves permission to rate our morality. But our chosen meals aren’t proof of our goodness or badness. Deprivation or hyper-control doesn’t equate to health and virtue, appetite isn’t something feral and dangerous to be disciplined. Food is an inanimate object that we can use as we like – to nourish, energize or comfort. How we eat will always be in flux depending on our circumstances, whether that be emotional or physical.

I think the best thing you can do is acquaint yourself with the idea of intuitive eating. It’s a seemingly simple concept that many of us have to relearn at some point in our lives. Intuitive eating is about tuning in to your body, listening to what it wants and responding compassionately. It’s about quietening the chatter you’ve been absorbing your whole life – all the contradictory rules and convoluted calorie counting – and instead focusing on the requirements of your appetite and tastes. We are all born with an innate ability to do this (you never see a toddler leaving 20 per cent of its meal on a plate because it read an article saying this is what French women do), but tragically it is a skill that is stolen from so many of us.

Because another clever thing the diet industry did was make us believe that our instincts are wrong, that if we ate what we want when we wanted it, we’d live off a mountain of éclairs, a river of Baileys and nothing else. That’s just not true. If you can find a way to eat intuitively, without any cycles of restriction and reward, your body will find its way to the weight where it is naturally most comfortable.

And if all that fails, try this: every time you go to feed yourself, imagine that you are feeding one of your children. Every time you finish a meal and you want to berate yourself for the decisions you made: imagine you are speaking to one of your children. If they came to you – tired, anxious or ill – would you give them a calorie-counted meal, or would you give them what they were craving? If they ate something that brought them joy, would you remind them afterwards that they could have eaten something that was less pleasurable but lower in fat? Would you tell them to take notice of the letter on the label in their clothes and attach a sense of self-worth to it? Would you let them believe that the letter on that label was an indicator of whether someone will fall in love with them?

The sad truth is women are conditioned to feel like physical failures if they don’t conform to an impossible specification, so the language of self-hatred is easily accessible to us. I don’t want to pretend that this propaganda isn’t incredibly powerful, and I don’t want you to feel even more self-hatred for taking it on and believing it. So, for now, try a trick instead: imagine you are your own child and care for yourself accordingly. That might be the only way you’ll allow yourself the logic and kindness you deserve.

This made me cry.

What fabulous advice this is. Ye gads.

(via coffeeinacoldhell)

life advice kindness

Anonymous asked:

Do you have any references for centaur foals? It's really hard to find any references that's not adults

theartingace Answer:

Yea! Enjoy a dump of all my centaur babies!
They’re mostly a bit older drawings but I think they still hold up haha and I don’t think many people draw them cause they can be a little funky- what with the chunky little bodies on big ol spidery legs 😅 But I still think they’re cute 💜

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And a lot of my drawings of the bitties are in slings, as that’s how I built in infant care with an L-shaped infant 😂

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and of course, some goofy little baby Sunny doodles <3

baby wearing centaurs art adorable

headspace-hotel:

splashcat413:

headspace-hotel:

ninjaotta:

aquilacalvitium:

mycroftrh:

memeuplift:

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Ooh ooh ooh! This looks like an excellent excuse valid reason to talk about one of my favorite topics, matriarch trees!

So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you’re like ‘these are unconnected critters,’ right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There’s this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we’re gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.

And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.

If there’s a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they’ll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn’t much potassium.

And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.

Trees will share so much of their resources, they’ll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn’t able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!

You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago… but if you scrape the stump it’s still green wood. The tree’s still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.

I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here’s where we get to them.

In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they’ve developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.

So what do they do?

They feed baby trees.

Baby saplings in an old forest can’t reach up to the sun. There’s no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can’t get on her own, she’ll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.

And one of the best parts - she won’t just do it for her own species. She’ll connect to all kinds of trees, because they’re all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She’ll adopt the whole forest’s children.

Sometimes in forests you’ll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil’s more fertile from the decomposition.

But no.

They’re her children, and she’s spent centuries keeping the whole forest alive.

@mycroftrh

My mum is an avid tree lover and when I told her what you wrote she practically melted and told me to thank you for teaching her :)

baby trees: mother please feed us

matriarch trees:

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This is a pretty accurate breakdown of how forests work and you can read Suzanne Simard’s book Finding the Mother Tree to learn more about it

I remember watching a Planet Earth episode on succession in the rainforest after a great tree falls. It was all about plants competing for space and sunlight. I doubt its contents were wrong, but the level of cooperation that goes on in forests I never learned about continually amazes me.

This is getting rambly, but I’m having a train of thought, so let’s follow it.

Evolution is a process involving millions of organisms spread across time and space and any organism’s ability to personally outcompete everything around it has far less weight than the ability of everything around it that shares its genes to survive on average.

In moral philosophy, the Original Position is a thought experiment created by John Rawls asking you to design a society without knowing what role in that society you will fill. Since you might end up at the bottom of the class structure, you would be incentivized to structure things such that those at the bottom still have it pretty good.

A tree’s DNA does not know what will happen to the tree over its life. It could be the tree on the right or the tree on the left. It’s evolutionarily advantageous for trees to naturally help other trees even though that costs them some of their own nutrients because the trees that are helped put down seeds and reproduce and they’re the same tree, archetypally, the tree on the left and the tree on the right started from practically identical seeds and either is equally capable of passing on the pattern of “tree which helps other trees.”

This is not rigorous. I am not an arbologist or an evolutuonary biologist. But it’s interesting, how politically charged the idea of the survival of the fittest is, and how what fitness actually looks like in nature doesn’t really fit that narrative.

Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean “fit” like this:

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It means “fit” like THIS:

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Or in other words, an organism’s survival is dependent on how “fit” it is for its environment.

In the right environment, anything can be an advantage. Being strong or smart can be a detriment—a big brain and big muscles take up a lot of energy to sustain.

Furthermore, competition between two species doesn’t always (or even usually) drive one of the species to extinction. Competition drives adaptation.

If there are two species of seed-eating birds that rely on the same resources to survive, it doesn’t mean one of them will go extinct. It often means that they will both evolve more specific preferences in seeds they like to eat, and when, and where, so they don’t have to compete anymore.

This is how you get species that occupy hyperspecific niches where they only eat the leaves of one single plant, or something.

Anyway, trees:

We are discovering more and more that the classic view of nature as made of individual organisms competing for their own interests is misleading.

70-90% of all land plants form symbiotic relationships with fungi that live on their roots. In many cases, the fungal hyphae literally penetrate inside the plant cells to exchange nutrients and resources with them.

The mycorrhizal network, as it is called, links every tree in a forest. Basically every tree is linked to multiple species of fungi, and many fungi link to many species of tree. The mycorrhizal network allows nutrients and chemical signals to move between trees. Using their connection to the network, some trees can survive in completely dry soil by linking to fungi that get water by breaking down ROCKS.

And this symbiosis is OLD. It’s so old, that the earliest fossils of land plants, from 400 million years ago, are attached to seemingly identical fungi to the ones that form symbiosis with plants now.

Suzanne Simard, one of the main researchers of mycorrhizal networks, coined the term “Mother Tree” to refer to the very old trees that support young trees via the mycorrhizal network. She picked this anthropomorphic language intentionally—to challenge our understanding of trees. They communicate. They sense and respond to their environment. They engage in behaviors. And yes, one of those behaviors appears to be parental care.

You think of yourself as an individual, but you could not survive without the teeming multitudes of microbes that live in and on you. Your cells contain mitochondria that have their own DNA, relics of a time when they were their own individual organisms.

Lichens, as you probably know, are a symbiosis between at least two organisms, a fungus, an alga, and sometimes microbes of other types (I forget which). They are their own distinct organism made of multiple very different organisms working together.

It is becoming more and more helpful to view forests as enormous super-organisms with collective interests and a high level of coordination.

The fact is that trees thrive around other trees. Most tree species seriously suffer alone. It is ideal for most trees to live as part of a forest.

The very nature of a forest is far more cooperative and interconnected than the old models can do justice to. A deciduous forest redistributes a HUGE amount of nutrients every year when leaves fall to the ground. Every tree feeds the other trees. Nothing is wasted. Arguably, trees regularly engage in matriphagy. Soft, crumbly decomposing wood is an ideal substrate for sprouting young trees. When I’m in the forest and need to sample some mycelium-rich dirt, I find a large dead tree and dig right around its base. When a tree dies, the mycelium flourish right around the base of the tree; decomposers break the old tree down into rich, fertile soil.

Landscaping and lawn care forums and websites cause me pain, because the average person is so eager to wildly overwater, overfertilize, and generally over-manage their backyard in the mistaken belief that “too much competition with other plants” is the problem with every plant.

Very barren, empty environments (like overmanaged lawns) are very extreme. The term “Extremophile” is subjective and relative to human preferences, but I can make a pretty good case that dandelions, crabgrass and other plants that flourish as lawn weeds are extremophiles.

The fluctuations in temperature and moisture, extreme soil compaction, and absence of a healthy mycelium network in the soil in a manicured lawn makes conditions incredibly harsh. Most plants cannot handle being blasted from leaf to root with sunlight all day with 0 shade from other plants, and growing in soil with no other plant roots. Most plants cannot thrive without the shelter, nutrients, and cooperation that a community of plants provides.

Forests create fertile, stable environments that allow for a huge diversity of plants to grow. Every participant in the ecosystem is critical to the survival of the others. Ecosystems are so, so, so much more interconnected than popular science usually portrays.

ecology forests read later

bitchesgetriches:

knottahooker:

elfwreck:

fairytalepsuedonym:

mossmuddy-deactivated20230511:

ri-writing:

luimnigh:

typhlonectes:

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[id: Tweet by iconawrites, which reads: “I love public libraries because they are built on the principle that books are so important and so necessary to human flourishing that access to them cannot depend on your income.” end id.]

I was a grown ass adult before I realized the library was free.  I went into the library and asked to join.  When they gave me the form to fill out for a library card, I asked if they took credit cards and the librarian had to explain to me that the library was free.  You did not pay to join it.

I cried.

ITS FREE?? YOU DONT EVEN HAVE TO PAY MONEY FOR THE CARD??? THATS AMAZING

I think some librsries might have you oay a small fee for the card but most dont.

Most don’t charge for the card as long as it’s your first one. There may be a $5 fee to replace it if you lose it.

Or not. Depends on the local library’s funds. But their budget generally includes free cards for users.

Libraries are free! We may charge if you don’t live in our county/state/down/district, but that’s because your taxes don’t go toward paying for us. Many libraries are even going fine free for late materials, so if you’re forgetful like me, it’s okay! And we offer e-book and downloadable audiobook services, so you can get books for free even from home!

Use your local library, we’re pretty cool!

The Library Is a Magical Place and You Should Fucking Go There

Your Library Lets You Stream Audiobooks and eBooks FOR FREEEEEEE! 

(via dduane)

there’s a small cost for my community library but it encompasses 2 counties and all the towns within them and if they don’t have it at your local branch they’ll order it in from anywhere in the province support libraries libraries public good


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