#This is our common planet

[dectech]

We all know about the fuss around Pluto, how many decry its "demotion" to a dwarf planet, and how it's still an honorary planet in the hearts of many, and I totally get it, but I don't think any of you out there are taking it far enough.

What about the rest of the so-called "dwarf" planets, huh? where's their justice? what about Ceres? Haumea? Makemake? Eris? fucking Quaoar?! why have just eight planets when you can have 18?! Why only invite Pluto to the party if you're already gonna expand the guest's list?!

you know what should be "demoted"? fucking Phobos and Deimos, the two "moons" of Mars. these two motherfuckers are proof that the barrier-to-entry for moons is too low. they're barely visible, they don't effect mars in any meaningful way, they aren't even round since they aren't big enough to round themselves under their own gravity, and one of them isn't even in a stable orbit of Mars! Phobos is gonna get ripped apart by mars' gravity in just a few dozen million years!

the concept of a "Dwarf Moon" is too good for them. they should be called, like, sateloids or something. Lunoids at most. fuck em

[tbalderdash-art-blog]

Our Planet Week Day 1: Among the Stars.

Reference photo by Fraser Simpson

It's quite poetically sad that I missed Earth Day because I was in college in the city. I'd much rather be with the birds.

[droodlebug]

will you tell us more abt your fantasy world’s high elf/orcs please 👀

absolutely!!! Theyre referred as either high elves or orcs depending on where you are in the world and who youre talking to. Some people use one or the other, or use them interchangably.

Before society and sapience came along and whatnot, orcs evolved for rainforests, deserts, forests, and any ecosystem with a heavy focus on plant life (so most of them really!) and lots of sun. Very widespread. Their skin is green, or green ish, and a little waxy to the touch because they have chloroplasts. They photosynthesize, giving them extra energy. Because of that they dont need to sleep much, or even at all, depending on how much sun they've gotten! It also allows them to channel more magic via their appendix (thats the Magic organ). High elf magic users are going to be strongest during the day and a little weakened at night. In thick forests amd rainforests, they would (and some still will!) climb to the tree tops to absorb sun. Hence the name high elf.

They evolved to have tusks in order to scrape bark off trees, get cactus skin, and open cacti and tough-skinned fruits. They are able to properly digest fiber unlike most people. Though, in the modern world as society came together, their tusks are usually viewed with respect. Something to decorate and customize (they dont stop growing!), giving a kind of thanks to their tusks for historically having played a big part in their diet and survival in the past.

Speaking of diet, while they are omnivorous like all elves, they do lean more herbivorous! Many of the groups and places youll find that are orc heavy and orc-led will have an extra care and appreciation for the plants around them.

Unfortunately, I'm still workshopping the societal and cultural parts of high elves and most of my variants. I know where I want everything to end up and some overarching beats of the world, but I get caught up focusing more on speculative fantasy biology and not getting deep into how society would build up, what cultures would be made, and how it eventually all comes together in a modern fantasy setting with magic and technology together and with people from any kind of variant of person being able to be found anywhere withoit surprise, and for it not to be at all unusual to see people that dont fit neatly into any one variant label. That is a hugeee run on sentence lmao.

But ive had this fantasy world in my head for years and try to be very intentional in building a world without colonialism and implying any one variation of person is better or different or good or evil or whatever. It's all just people! I especially want to do right by orcs since tolkein's popularization of them is written as a blatent racist "barbaric" caricature of Black people. Now as I type that I realize I havent drawn any Black high elves! I should fix that. In the meantime heres a couple of orcs ive drawn in the past. Thank you for asking I Loveeee rambling about my fantasy stuff always and forever!!! I hope it's interesting!!!

[eugenedebs1920]

Lol! I wrote a whole post about this article but the link didn’t seem to work 😅 Adhere to some brevity here. 6 out of 9 planetary thresholds has been breached, the oceans in particular are on a knife’s edge. This election is not whether you like the candidates or who will be better for your wallet. It’s about the Supreme Court and their continuous assault against our planet, and also our democracy. They’ve sided with polluters time and time again and seem hell bent on deregulating all the safeguards meant to protect us, and the planet. There’s candidates on one side like, Kamala Harris &Tim Waltz who believe this is a problem that needs addressed, then there’s Vance and Trump on the other who think it’s fake and temperatures just rise ten plus degrees in a century normally. If you weren’t planning on voting & this is a concern of yours, please get out there and take action for it. This is the tool we have right now to fix this. It’s not a total fix but Biden made good headway & we know Kamala will continue this . For our future, for our future children’s future, for all the beauty that is this planet. Get out and vote and vote blue for our little bright blue ball just spinning spinning free, dizzy with eternity 😁

Wasn’t quite as short as I intended 😝

[vulpine-spectacle]

ECHOES IN OUR BLOOD by Vulpine_Spectacle

THE PARENTS OF FEYD-RAUTHA AND BEAST RABBAN.

It is the scream of a woman that spurs Abulurd into a faster pace, despite the pain of shards imprinting into his face, then the snow biting into his flesh. The door to Feyd-Rautha’s nursery is open wide, so Abulurd need only stagger forward into it. The sight that awaits him is sickening. Thora. His wife, his love, lays upon the ground. Blood pours ceaselessly from the stump of her neck. Her body twitches, her nightgown stained with blood and stab wounds across her torso, and her head is in the hands of her killer. “Glossu,” breathes Abulurd. His eldest son stands there before him, clutching Thora’s head in his large, calloused hands. The boy who he had left behind on Arakkis is now a man. He is exceptionally large in stature and muscle, adorned in fine black armor dusted in snow and painted by blood. His smile is like his uncle's, cruel. Twisting his own mother’s head between his hands, he finally looks up to face his father. Carelessly, Rabban throws the head of Thora across the room. It rolls in an expression of frozen pain and terror to the feet of Abulurd. He feels his lip quiver as he looks at it, then at his own son. Beyond this room, he can still hear the massacre transpring through the corridors. Broken windows, guards being slaughtered, the screams of his servants. “Your own mother?” Abulurd says, his voice quivering. Rabban’s back straightens. “I am no son of yours or hers,” he says, his voice rough and thick. He glances towards the crib at the center of the room where Feyd-Rautha is standing, clutching the rim of it and peering over to watch it unfold. He is crying. “Nor is he.” Nor is he.

[angeltannis]

TRAGIC that so much of Frey’s cringe is lost on Cuff because he assumes it’s just how Earth people are

[sp4ceboo]

ai rant in tags bc im so fucking tired

[ppeachx3]

About Amy's family, how do you feel about Amy being part echidna? Since nobody knows who her parents are and with Amy super strenght and downward quills it's a popular headcanon. It would also be very cute, Knuckles and Amy are kind of like siblings making her part echidna it could mean they could be related somehow, maybe distant cousins. What do you think?

i love this theory! i think it's super interesting and also raises some interesting questions about what happened to the echidnas, are there any others living in hiding on the surface, and what this means in terms of amy and knuckles as relatives...

personally i do think they're related!! the easy answer is 'duh they're red and pink think about it' but my answer as a jewish person who has worked with elders tracking down family trees across generations? they're related, but it's distant enough to where if they Were to somehow have their relatives all lined up in a neatly organized tree neither of them would know who tf the other is talking about until they find a shared ancestral branch from like 300 years ago LOL

but also i dont think either of amy's parents are fully echidnas... her quills and fur color are probably something that's been passed down.

[mejomonster]

Why so many people in my city only looking for something casual. Where is my soulmate who also desires love ;-;

[frostyspinch]

thinking how nature followed a very specific and very random pattern of evolution too that matched the favorable convenient conditions/order of events which happened to our earth (also random) caused both by internal and external factors to finally get to human evolution , i really doubt there are people of a similar nature as us out there. i think it would be more crazy to expect there to be humans than to not expect it

[beyourselfchulanmaria]

🔸️普通翠鳥是在大多數歐洲地區唯一可見的翠鳥，並在使內陸水域結凍的冬季時向南遷徙。其外觀上是明顯的藍綠色及橘色，以及背上一條寶石藍色的條紋。雌雄之間可由下半鳥喙的顏色區分：雄鳥跟上半喙一樣為黑色，而雌鳥則帶有紅色。這種鳥類易與其他數種翠鳥混淆，但通常可從其橫貫眼睛及耳羽之間的橘色條紋區分。牠們相當適應於潛水，並有著特化的視覺構造而能看清水面下的獵物，甚至能夠穿越薄冰層去捕捉獵物。

🔸️這種鳥類通常採一夫一妻制，在沿岸的河床邊掘洞築巢繁殖後代，每次約產5—7枚蛋，19—21天後孵化，並在24—27天後離巢。在文化層面上，普通翠鳥在東西方文化中都有出現在相關的神話及藝術創作內，並有一定程度的正面意涵存在。但這種翠鳥的數量因對水質跟沿岸環境的需求，以及對嚴冬的耐受性相當低等原因，其族群正在逐步下滑。不過目前其數量仍然眾多且分佈廣泛，在《國際自然保護聯盟瀕危物種紅色名錄》中被評為無危物種。

“Most of the time you just see a flash of blue, but to really see the beauty of the kingfisher you have to slow it down.” RTÉ

[nightgarla]

its so weird how in every piece of space sci fi the aliens call our planet "earth" like..... thats not her name........

her name is tellus, earth is just the common english name for her. WHY WOULD THEY USE THAT!!!!

[captain-ultimat-doggo]

Humans entering space and realizing we are so small. We are mice compared to these giant races with their advanced machinery and technologies and experiences beyond us- except that we're humans. And our engineers dive into the new tech and once we learn the principles we also soon realize how Inefficient everything is. Their "microchips" are the size of cars, their storage drives are basically buildings, and they somehow store less data than ours. So, human companies take advantage, and tech starts rolling out. Massive and there's a lot of wasted space so that it can be managed with larger hands/pincers/claws/tentacles, but also so much more efficient than anything the galaxy has seen before.

Human technicians start hopping ships and upkeeping the general maintenance, the stuff that most aliens put off or don't notice because they never access the crevices of their ships. As human companies become more popular and lead the tech world in everything from warp cores to game stations ("it's so compact! How are the graphics so good?" Says a 60' tall grimbleback, holding a new VR headset that has all of its components included because it's so BIG by our tech standards), soon many things have accessibility ports for humans to be able to use as well. This means that these shiprats hoping ship to ship cause such a huge improvement in everything running smoothly, and there's a huge downtick in pests on ships because those "pests" are not only big enough and aggressive enough to bite a pitbull or a person in half, they're invasive to so many planets and humans hate nothing more than dog killing planet overrunning monsters.

All the while, from the Aliens perspective, humans are an elusive race that don't fraternize much with them. You almost never see a human as most places aren't exactly safe for the little things to run around in. They do export so much stuff though, and the custodial staff at the Central Galactic Outpost insists that there's more humans around than any other race if you just know where to look.

And sure it's somewhat known that some of the little daredevils hop ships and help out in exchange for room and board, usually without permission, but that can't be that common, can it?

Maybe your ship is running better this cycle ever since you stopped at the last station, that just means that tuneup was better than you thought. And maybe for some reason that program you were working on last night is finished when you wake up, but you're so tired maybe you finished it before you passed out. Somehow that faulty light in the galley has fixed itself as well, which is odd, but maybe the Engineer finally got to it. You'd know if there was someone else on your ship.

Right?

... You leave a little bowl of berries out as a thank you, just in case. You're not sure what humans like but you've heard they have a sweet tooth.

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

Solar Power vs. The Darkness of Trump - Bill McKibben in #CommonDreams

"All this is the premise for understanding why the fossil fuel industry is so freaked out about this year’s election. They can read these charts as easily as anyone, and they know what’s coming…. They have to lock in customers right now, or else watch their whole business start to slowly, and then quickly, fade. And with that fade will come, inevitably, reduced political power."

[red-red-spout]

Yeah this is just the rare earth hypothesis again

fucks me up that by total coincidence the sun and moon's size difference is exactly matched to their difference in distance from us, thus making our beautiful total solar eclipses where you can see the silver threads of the sun's corona possible because the moon just covers the sun completely

The stars (literally) aligned just right for this experience to be possible. It's likely that aliens don't have this

[micamone]

i dont have a lot of spanish music in my phone and like. its even less when compared to like the huge amount of not spanish music on there. anyways that means even though i almost always have music playing its rare for this situation to have occured but

its late, and my phone started playing spanish music from the other room while i brushed my teeth. and listening to the muffled crooning and trumpets i was briefly thrown back into my 12 year old body, standing in my childhood bathroom listening to the neighbors loudly play their music down the street while i got ready for bed and felt such a crushing sense of longing and homesickness for a community I'll never have again that. i think i might actually be ill now