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It really bums me out that I’ve never seen a horror studio do big scary bugs effectively—no screeching or “unsettling squishy creature noises” or wet bugs but honest to god horrifyingly silent and fast things that kill because they are a machine designed to turn killing into energy and not some pathetic mammal who kills from a sense of hatred or other dignity of emotion. I feel like an alien forest with these and one myriapod or, oh my god, a radiodont? Bug jaws.

If you had to pick 10 aquatic creatures to have terrestrial variants, which ones would you pick? (Inspired by your desire for Land Barnacles).

So other than barnacles,

A real actual tiny little "tree octopus"

Eunice worm just sticking out of the dirt in your yard. Owwie!!!

The deep sea predatory tunicate but it catches flies

"Sea" star that climbs around in forests eating snails and stuff

Great big stinging forest urchin. Maybe it eats rotten wood?

Hooded nudibranch that camouflages as lichen

HUGE burrowing mantis shrimp, like coconut crab scale. OWWIE!!!! haha

Horseshoe crab that dwells in deserts like a scorpion

Giant sea spider the size of your hand, and it sucks blood

Anemones so tiny they grows like gelatinous moss, and can sting you!! I want there to be stinging jelly tentacle moss!!!!!

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I’ve got my tumblr inbox turned off so I really have to commend the person who actually emailed me to let me know they don’t like the things I’ve posted about the UnitedHealth CEO being murdered on their commitment to their beliefs.

But seen as how you emailed me from a dud email that appears to be bouncing back replies and I really wanted to address something you said to me about violence begetting violence:

My migraine medication, the medication I was given for my debilitating neurological disease that has gotten so bad I spent most of this year actively suicidal, costs $1300 a month.

My insurance covered it. But only because my doctors office went to fucking war for me because I’m a high anaphylaxis risk for the drugs the insurance wanted me to try.

Because that’s the thing.

My doctors knew, based on my documented medical history, I likely wouldn’t be a good fit for the “first line” of preventative migraine drugs, but because of insurance, I had to be given drugs that were contradictory to my other life threatening conditions, because otherwise insurance wouldn’t cover anything else.

I failed them. Spectacularly and with an anaphylactic reaction to one of them. And I was still warned insurance would fight me because I hadn’t tried the remaining drug they wanted me to try.

A drug which I would have to take in an ER waiting room because my mast cell disease is unpredictable but insurance wouldn’t cover in-patient treatment to let me try it safely under medical supervision.

Is that not violence?

Were all the times I was denied coverage for vital and necessary procedures that could have prevented my disabilities from worsening not violence?

Maybe not in the sense you mean. But I assure you it felt very much like violence to me.

Do I condone murder? No, obviously. But I’m also sick and tired of people pretending that what is happening to the American people every day isn’t eugenics through class warfare.

Violence begets violence.

It sure fucking does.

Maybe these insurance companies should have thought of that first.

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This 5 Minute Crafts video: “The bar was so low it was a tripping hazard in Hell, yet here you are, limbo dancing with the devil.”

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The unrestrained pining of “All Over You” by The Spill Canvas has me feeling some kind of way

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I choked on bile at this tweet. Regardless of what might be colloquially called the “barbarity” of the Assad regime, for the President of France to call any Syrian government “barbaric” is beyond contemptible. For context, the Covenant of the League of Nations (Part One of the Treaty of Versailles ending the First World War) Article 22 paragraph 1 reads:

“To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant.”

And relevant to Syria, paragraph 4: “Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.”

The Allied Powers at the end of World War One, having officially promised independence to Arabs living under the Ottoman Empire in exchange for the successful Arab Revolt that brought Allied victory in Southwest Asia, decided instead to go through with the secret Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France: they would carve up the Arab populations into League of Nations mandates ostensibly because they didn’t think Arabs were “civilized” enough to govern themselves, but very obviously to ensure that resource extraction was geared toward foreign exploitation rather than local development. Every Southwest Asian conflict of the past century can ultimately be traced to this denial of sovereignty and subsequent efforts to maintain it or, failing that, to reify the arbitrary divisions that keep the region fractured and exploitable: Muslim, Christian, and Jewish groups, who had enjoyed relatively peaceful coexistence in Southwest Asia and North Africa after the end of the Middle Ages, were pitted against one another, with Western historiography alleging a continuity of conflict to push the myth of persistent Arab aggression and Muslim barbarity, a common trope in French discourse.

When Syria resisted the creation of a League of Nations “Mandate,” the Franco-Syrian War proved it would be nothing more than a French colony. Despite their efforts to divide Syria along sectarian lines—for instance, by creating a Christian-dominated Lebanon—they would ultimately put down a later Great Syrian Revolt by aerial bombardment of civilians. The Free French, rightly lauded in the West for their resistance to Nazi occupation, hypocritically betrayed the treaty granting Syrian independence and with the British invaded Syria to once again render it a colony after only 5 years of being an independent republic. France tried to retain control of Syria after World War II by arresting Syrian representatives and bombing Damascus again, and the UN had to intervene to guarantee the country’s independence.

The social divisions and arbitrary territorial divisions maintained by the French, as well as frequent Western interference in the politics of their neighbors, resulted in the persistent factionalism that ultimately led to the rise of the Syrian Arab Socialist (Ba’ath) Party. As seen elsewhere in Southwest Asia, dictators ruling by force were the only way to successfully maintain a government in the context of foreign interference in elections and diplomacy, so the Assad regime came to power in Ba’athist Syria.

If France hadn’t convinced itself of Arab “barbarism” and French “civilization,” Assad would not have happened in the first place. Macron’s tweet in English is meant to propagandize to Anglos who don’t know their history.

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Dude

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And a show where a chemistry teacher turned to crime because he couldn’t afford his cancer treatment, Breaking Bad. We all done knew about it.

I think non-Americans need to calm down on the ‘respect the dead health insurance CEO’ policing of Americans who are forced to live in a system where they have to pay for healthcare.

Like there’s always going to be a bit of a “Violence is never the answer” throwaway line, but that’s not really true, is it?

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Doomed country

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I just saved $40 from the price of a book on Amazon by buying it from ThriftBooks and Anna’s Archive partner servers were down last I checked

use, and i cannot stress this enough, thriftbooks

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I like how “I know next to nothing” includes basic rules of the game and its fundamental textual and artistic style but the rules have been built so far up vertically at this point that you are impenetrably arcane to the totally uninitiated but being even a single update cycle removed makes you a hopeless novice otherwise. Truly a “one or two feldspars” kind of media.

I had a dream i got a fastfood meal and found a small bag with two loose cigarettes in it and when i took a picture of them they turned into magic cards for loose cigarettes

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“She breathes through her skin” is probably the archetype at this point, with an extra layer of meaning from that fact that it comes from Kojima whose white boy fans are Like That

You know, I'm usually very live and let live about people talking about Watsonian explanations versus Doylist ones and that people need to let these viewpoints coexist and recognise when people are using which as a lens for interpretation. But let's not be disingenuous and pretend that people don't immediately fall back on the Watsonian explanation and bring those up incessantly the moment you want to talk about the racial or gendered or imperialist structures and logics baked into a text. The use and leverage of Watsonian explanations in fandom is not neutral especially when it disproportionately gets pulled in these contexts (and usually by a very specific demographic of fan).

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Nah okay so they are also the second person equivalent of my and mine but they have that rule that I just learned about, thank you. My and mine used to work that way, apparently! I had heard “mine own” as an archaic “my own” but hadn’t ever bothered to learn why so this demystifies that for me. But yeah you should also say “the books are thine” in the same way as “the books are mine.” See the consonant/vowel distinction is irrelevant there? I mean sound rules affect it but it also has different grammar is what I’m saying.

Btw, it's "thy" if the following word starts with a consonant, and "thine" if the next word begins with a vowel e.g.

"I wish to hold thy hand"

"drink to me only with thine eyes"

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ismailboumhand16

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The fact that the ad is so poorly designed that you can’t read the logo at the top left just adds to it