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many experts do not understand how incredibly important this one gif is

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Honestly, part of why it irritates me when people act performatively shocked at the homophobia in 2000s media is it wasn't just media. "Can you believe this aired in 2008" buddy, in 2008 I was having shit thrown at me from moving cars for having long hair, and you wanna get worked up about sitcoms?

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anrealage - ss25

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A demon simply called The Brother. It doesn't have siblings or any family, and it's ambiguous whether that creature itself is even male at all. It just keeps turning everything and everyone into broth.

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yippee yay wahoo! etc

(by kirii.lines on instagram)

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Ilya Batrakov

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No symptom is actually exclusive to one specific diagnosis. That person might be experiencing X due to depression while someone else is experiencing it due to autism while a third experiences it due to a personality disorder and a fourth due to schizophrenia. And while there might be differences in certain symptom combinations between each disorder listed here, none of these people actually gets to claim X as a "my disorder only" experience

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do you guys wanna see the most perfectest png of my cat

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It’s so fascinating to me that we’ve only been breeding Komodo dragons in captivity for thirty years. In that time, our understanding of them has actually really revolutionized the way we understand the social lives and behaviors of lizards in general, and it’s mostly thanks to this lady right here, who was born 30 years ago on September 13, 1992.

Kraken was the first Komodo to be bred in captivity. She hatched out at GMU, but was raised at the National Zoo. Her parents were wild-caught dragons- there’s still WC dragons in the AZA today- and this one specific individual probably did more to revolutionize lizard care in professional settings than any other individual lizard throughout zoo history.

Until Kraken, social enrichment wasn’t a thing people thought about. It wasn’t something anybody felt was necessary for lizards, because they were just… lizards. Sure, some keepers would play with their favorites, but it wasn’t until the National Zoo started documenting what she was doing that anybody realized how much Komodo dragons like to play with us too.

Kraken’s not in that video, but she’s the one who inspired all of the social studies that have been done on captive Komodo dragons. When she was at the National Zoo, her keepers  started getting curious when, for no apparent reason, she kept gingerly stealing things from peoples’ pockets and tugging on their shoelaces. So they started giving her stuff- Frisbees, blankets, soda cans, anything she showed an interest in.

She played with them, just like a mammal might. The way play behavior is described in psychology is a given activity that’s voluntary, repeated, and conducted under “relatively benign” circumstances. Keeper staff found that her conduct during the study met all of these criteria. “Kraken,” they wrote, had clearly demonstrated “play-like behavior with objects and even with humans (tug-of-war).” Moreover, she “could discriminate between prey and nonprey” while showing “varying responses” with different items (rubber rings, shoes, etc.). (There’s an excellent book on Komodo dragons that has an entire chapter devoted to her.)

Kraken died several years ago, but her legacy continues today. There’s several of her descendants still in the AZA, and the intelligence and social needs she demonstrated led to the improvement of life for these guys- and other lizards. The Komodo dragon program has been an eye opener, not just for reptile conservation, but for understanding reptile intelligence and how this incredible clade of animals functions.

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I just had the best encounter with a child at Kmart. I was in the aisle shopping, and this girl and her dad come around the corner. The girl sees me and excitedly exclaims “There’s a human here!!” to which the father replied “Yes, there’s humans everywhere.”

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Linktober (but not quite) Day 25– Lanayru Promenade

Our heroes hitch free transport to the icy mountains of Lanayru mountain! Yes, it’s a dragon, and yes, it’s not very safe, but the world of Hyrule is Vast and they’re very, very small.

(Welcome back totk au Familiar Familiar! Zelda doesn’t go back in time and it devolved from there)

((Want to request sketches and look at my sketchbook? Consider my patreon!))

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Great Kiskadee (Pitangus sulphuratus), family Tyrannidae, order Passeriformes, Costa Rica

photograph by Gary Lowry

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w