#World of Feathers

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather previous / next

tw: blood

[thelvadams]

He's back... with a vengeance.

WALLACE AND GROMIT: VENGEANCE MOST FOWL (2024)

[wayward-delver]

Prehistoric Planet finally gives us the True Rival to the Tyrant Lizard King and it's NOT a Dinosaur.

[rocy5]

[theminecraftbee]

honestly I love the docm77 list of weaknesses because he’s like, this supervillain who acts like he’s big and dangerous and invincible, but like, an incomplete list of things that will waylay him entirely:

creating cute shrubbery

stressmonster specifically

breaking one (1) piece of redstone

social experiments mumbo finds on reddit

his own hubris

other people’s hubris (looking at you scar)

card games

the inexorable urge to overshare on twitter

hippies

divorce (this one’s looking at bdubs)

calling his bluff

afk fishing

as joe once said: this man is extremely easily vinced,

[dayurno]

his favorite color is red and he loves pineapples and he loves the trojans because they are kind and he has to run laps around the bus to keep from falling asleep when they have early games and he doesn’t like running but he knows it’s important so he does it anyway and he learned how to braid thea’s hair for her and he knew what riko was like, if neil wanted to talk and he said he didn’t want andrew anymore so riko wouldn’t hurt him and he used to write jean memories and notes in postcards and he forgave andrew for baltimore without even needing an apology and and and

[girlboyburger]

herd on the hill

[cracklewink]

some sketches of my guy

[tenspontaneite]

fancy pibble having a big think

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Errors, “Errors,” and Sci Fi

@strawberry-crocodile

tvtropes calls stuff like the wolf example "science matches on" which I think is a pretty fair shake

This.  This is what’s got me thinking so much about errors.  There’s a certain danger, here.  A certain way that this particular effect — delicious dramatic irony — tempts the mind when reading old stories, even true ones.

What do you know about R.M.S. Titanic? I ask my class every year, and the first hand rises.  “It was unsinkable,” the student inevitably says, and everyone is nodding, “or so they thought.”  I write the word UNSINKABLE on the board, underneath my crude drawing of a ship with four smokestacks.  It will be crossed out before the end of the hour, but not for the reason they expect.

“I find no evidence,” Walter Lord, preeminent biographer of the ship’s survivors, wrote, “that Titanic was ever advertised as unsinkable. This detail seems to have entered the collective mind so as to create a more perfect irony.”  Indeed, historians’ examinations of White Star Line documents show the shipbuilders themselves worried it would be so large as to risk collision; they stocked several more lifeboats than 1910s regulations required.

The War to End All Wars (deep breath, satisfied exhale), also known as World War ONE. Chuckle.  Shake of the head.  What if I told you that this phrase, used primarily in American newspapers after the fact, wasn’t meant to be literal? Nowadays we’d say The Mother of All Wars, or One Hell of a Fucking War, but we wouldn’t mean literal motherhood, literal intercourse.  What if I said the armistice and the Lost Generation and the Roaring 20s were all braced for another outbreak of European conflict, and yet we still failed to prevent it?

Did you know they were so confident in the safety of the S.S. Challenger that they put a civilian schoolteacher onboard? I do, because I’ve heard that one repeated many times.  Only, see, it’s got the cause and effect reversed.  Challenger launched on a day the shuttle’s engineers knew to be dangerously cold, because the first civilian in space was on board. And NASA knew its shuttle project would be cancelled entirely, if they couldn’t get that civilian’s much-delayed entry into space in the next two weeks.  So they launched on a cold day, and killed her instead.

These are all what cognitive science calls Hindsight Bias on the personal level, what sociology calls Presentism on the cultural level.  Social psychology’s a little of both, is primarily interested in why you’re sitting on your couch in a Colonize Mars shirt watching PBS and chuckling at the fools who believed in El Dorado.  It wants to know why the mind flees straight from “marijuana will kill you” to “marijuana will cure cancer” without so much as a pause on the middle ground of its real benefits and drawbacks, its real (mild) risks and rewards.

And they can paralyze the sci-fi writer, if you think too much about them. Jetsons is futurist one decade, retro the next.  “There are no bathrooms on the Enterprise,” the creators of Serenity say smugly, as if Gene Roddenberry should’ve simply known that decades later it’d be acceptable to show a man peeing in full view of the camera, nothing but the curve of the actor’s hand to protect his modesty.  “No sound in space,” the Fandom Menace says, “No explosions in space,” and “A space station can’t collapse in zero-G.”  Only then NASA burns a paper napkin outside of atmosphere, transmits music using only the ghost of nearby planets’ gravities, and logs onto Reddit long enough to point out the Death Star would implode in its own gravity field.  And now we’re the ones pointing, the ones laughing, at those earlier point-and-laughers.  Self-satisfied, smug in superiority.  As if we did the work to find out ourselves, instead of just happening to be born a little later than George Lucas.

[clickbaitdemo]

he who hides in the light

[montereybayaquarium]

🐧Feathered news bulletin: Penguin chick update🐧

 We have some exciting updates to share about our juvenile African penguin that hatched late last November. We recently found out the sex of Gerry the chick. Results are back — she’s female! 

She was named after Gerry Low-Sabado, an educator, community preservationist, and friend of the Aquarium. 

We were honored to host Gerry Low-Sabado’s family for their visit with our penguin chick. We’re so excited to watch Gerry the penguin grow up, and we bray hooray on this World Penguin Day!

Curious what it takes to raise African penguins at the Aquarium? Waddle on over to raising penguin chicks at the Aquarium!

Want to learn more about Gerry Low-Sabado? Find out more here.

[kittanimo]

Something I'm extremely proud of lmao

An animation of clumsy flying Sobek. One of my best animations so far

[wayward-delver]

Creature of the Night: 

“Feathered Dinosaurs aren’t scary,” is false, it’s about how it is presented and nothing is more terrifying than a bitter truth. 

by Jayson Duria/WobblyWorks

[revletter]

"Stellar fashion choice, Mario... ah, I see what you did there!"

A glow-up of some previous art!

In my headcanon, Geno has the most infectious laugh ever, and it's also super easy to make him laugh. A win-win.

[druidshollow]

realized i never posted this, redraw of this (lilac one ((feather)) is a shared character w @candlenav )