sulemania

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i used to have a running gag on twitter where i would tweet "i'm going to draw a horse" and then proceeded to draw a horse. here is a compilation

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everyone shut the fuck up and look at this snake named barcode

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Ethiopian wolves feed on the sweet nectar of a local flower, picking up pollen on their snouts as they do so – which may make them the first carnivores discovered to act as pollinators.

The Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) is the rarest wild canid species in the world and Africa’s most threatened carnivore. Endemic to the Ethiopian Highlands, fewer than 500 individuals survive.

Sandra Lai at the University of Oxford and her colleagues observed wild Ethiopian wolves lapping up the nectar of Ethiopian red hot poker (Kniphofia foliosa) flowers. Local people in the mountains have traditionally used the nectar as a sweetener for coffee and on flat bread.

The wolves are thought to be the first large carnivore species ever to be recorded regularly feeding on nectar.

“For large carnivores, such as wolves, nectar-feeding is very unusual, due to the lack of physical adaptations, such as a long tongue or specialised snout, and because most flowers are too fragile or produce too little nectar to be interesting for large animals,” says Lai.

The sturdy, nectar-rich flower heads of the poker plant make this behaviour possible, she says. “To my knowledge, no other large carnivorous predator exhibits nectar-feeding, though some omnivorous bears may opportunistically forage for nectar, albeit rarely and poorly documented.”

Some of the wolves were seen visiting as many as 30 blooms in a single trip. As they lick the nectar, the wolves’ muzzles get covered in pollen, which they could potentially be transferring from flower to flower as they feed.

“The behaviour is interesting because it shows nectar-feeding and pollination by non-flying mammals might be more widespread than currently recognised, and that the ecological significance of these lesser-known pollinators might be more important than we think,” says Lai. “It’s very exciting.”

Lai and her colleagues at the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme now hope to dig deeper into the behaviour and its ramifications. “Trying to confirm actual pollination by the wolves would be ideal, but that would be quite challenging,” she says. “I’m also very interested in the social learning aspect of the behaviour. We’ve seen this year adults bringing their juveniles to the flower fields, which could indicate cultural transmission.”

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they added shoes to fortnite and i've been losing my mind over it as i try out the air jordans on all my compatible skins. it looks photoshopped. i love this stupid game

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the need to animate pokemons

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that "is elesh norn conventionally attractive" post has reminded me to be angry about how her design has been gradually shifted to be less monstrous and more feminine over the years. the inhumanity is the reason the original concept art by richard whitters and the art for her first card by igor kieryluk make her so character design so compelling.

she's not a woman, she's a flesh construct that's vaguely woman-shaped. this is the glistening oil's blind attempt at recreating a symbol of holy purity.

by the next time we see her on a magic card, kieryluk's design has already been watered down into a more typically feminine shape. she looks like she could have at one point been an ordinary woman here. the gore texture has been removed to make her midriff look like a normal, albeit red, woman's tummy. her limbs are practically normal, and if she's still 8 feet tall in this pic she doesn't look like it.

art of elesh norn from promotional material for all will be one, and the art of her actual card in the set. her flat torso plate has been completely resculpted to more cartoonish womanly proportions, including breasts. her thighs are inexplicably curvy (with flesh, presumably).

WHAT I'M SAYING is that elesh norn WASN'T conventionally attractive, we just got frogboiled into her design being more like that.

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There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...

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"women didn't invent anything"

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hi, i’m your local laid off discord employee, here to talk about exactly how safe it may or may not be to talk about Political Activism on discord. my credentials here are that i was a senior member of discord’s trust & safety team, which is the team that handles bans, legal investigations, and legal compliance. (my speciality was in child safety, anti-grooming, and taking down CSAM, but i also worked occasionally in low level terrorism issues and assisted that team in investigations.) i also know most of the people still working there in these capacities.

the tldr and most important thing to know is: i do not recommend you plan, discuss plans, or use any kind of hyperbolic (or not) language about violence to government officials or anyone in that vicinity on discord. please use signal instead.

a discord trust & safety employee is technically able to see any message you’ve sent under your account, going all the way back to the beginning of your account. unless you have manually deleted a message, it is viewable to a tns employee. now: it is a tremendous part of being on a tns team that we did NOT invade user privacy without cause. cause was usually: another user reported something you said, and we thought the reported message indicated you might be doing something elsewhere that was illegal (for example: a user says “i’m talking to this girl but she’s in high school lol.” i would then try to find evidence as to whether or not there was a child safety issue there. in this example, we’d require clear admission of age from both the user and the alleged high school girl, and then clear evidence of sexual talk between them, and go from there.) finding evidence required looking though all of that user’s messages.

most of the tns team, as i know them, are pretty resolute about not going further in looking than would be needed for action. most of the tns team that i still speak to is very much on the side of blue. your general conversations are probably perfectly safe, and we were very good at figuring out quickly if someone has reported you maliciously. i don’t believe you need to worry too much about your porn and fanfic and all that.

HOWEVER: reported content must be investigated, and discord can, and has been, legally subpoenaed to turn over user information. again, this has nominally been in Very Evil cases (CSAM and grooming, school shooting threats, murder admissions, etc.) but that could change, either at the federal level, or at the discord policy level. discord, like any social media company, could easily be pressured or forced into taking on different internal policies that could get you in serious trouble if you are organizing violent or “illegal” resistance. if that happens, there is a scenario where this incoming administration is given access to your messages.

again: please do not organize your political or social resistance on discord from now on. please use signal to ensure your maximum safety. do not panic if you have already talks about things on discord: you can easily delete your messages, and that WILL remove from an employee’s view. do that and use signal from now on.

stay safe. i love you. 💕

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and on the pedestal, these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias--hope you're enjoying my kickass sculpture of two vast and trunkless legs of stone and a shattered visage! I built it in this desert to prove an important point about Society

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do you think i'm spooky?

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The temptation, when adapting a really iconic detective, is to delve into his personal backstory. That's the devil talking.

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My tour of sadness through Megacon.

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woke up this morning, rolled over, and very confidently tried to blow out my alarm clock like a candle. absolutely no precedent for that.

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I love our fat king pesto

I saw him recently and my dad almost couldn't believe he was real

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