#beautiful photos as always!!

[abattoirstars]

John Darnielle and John Oliver in the Brooklyn Masonic Temple for the AIDS Walk Benefit (2008)

[maximura]

[realtapiocafan]

first three is from the friends event, last four are from the fanatics event

[pinkmoonmp3]

maggie rogers via instagram

[crossbackpoke-check]

blessed be (lorscher bienensegen) | telling the bees (wiþ ymbe)

"Bees" [remixed, abridged], Claudia Emerson // "Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now" [remixed. abridged], Matthew Olzmann // "Letter to my Great, Great Grandchild" [remixed, abridged], J.P. Grasser | Len Redkole, Nina Weiss, Brian Babineau, Christian Peterson, Mitchell Leff, Dave Isaac, Megan DeRuchie

[hjbender]

Photos are great and paintings are lovely but the best tool with which to capture the moon's full beauty is the human eye

[stump-not-found]

Sorry if this has already been answered, but does Ford celebrate his birthday? I know its pretty hard to keep track of time when its ... nonlinear in the multiverse but I feel like Bill would know. And to ford every once and a while Bill demands his attention and he comes back to the pyramid to the wildest (worst) surprise party. The cake is human skin, candles are those really long wisdom teeth. Ford hates it.

i'll call out that a main plot point of chapter 4 is the fact bill gets ford presents on his b-day so yah its a regular thing, but they celebrate the day after his b-day

first birthday together bill probably does the skin cake thing but ford just rolls his eyes and sighs . bill almost fucking shoots himself after that response

[lovedecoded]

fucking with bearnelli soooooo heavy pre-2025 just feels like me and three other crazy people running around in circles for very good reasons and everyone else just looking at us like hm. i’ll get back to this later

[maythedreadwolftakeyou]

not a desert technically but I just visited the dunes in Monterey and gleefully trampled on some ice plant and I feel like you might enjoy that. if you wanna talk about the kinds of vegetation that grow in sandy soil or something I invite you to 👀

(also you're doing it! you're surviving! you'll get through that doctorate!)

ok ready this is my most important soapbox of all because soils in the desert are very special and have such cool organisms you don't find in these arrangements outside of drylands...

first lookee here. wauw beautiful utah

ok now look closer

no closer closer closer

CLOSER CLOSER CLOSER

WOW is that MOSS? you are thinking. the answer is YES. but doesn't moss like lots of water you are thinking??? WELL USUALLY. BUT in the desert you will notice that things like grasses and shrubs have lots of space between them unlike in more temperate climates-vegetation cover is not truly continuous. And there's less leaf litter than in forests obscuring the dirt. Which means all that soil is just sitting out in the open with nothing to protect it from being blown away by those harsh desert winds... except of course for our friends the BIOLOGICAL SOIL CRUSTS. also known as crypotbiotic soils, cryptogrammic soils, and biocrusts (for short).

These are communities of mosses, lichens, cyanobacteria (aka blue green algae--yes, those are usually Wet too, but ironically so so common in deserts), and the tens of thousands of surface and subsurface microbes that are associated with them. It's easy to forget just how many organisms are living in one single scoop of soil, especially because science can barely identify 1% of these microbes. Like of JUST the ones we have enough info to classify enough to count in my own master's dataset left me with over 25,000 unique taxonomic units I had to manage. don't worry about what that means just know it was very annoying and makes statistics a headache. anyway you find them all over the southwest US states as well as in other deserts around the world (spain, australia, sooo many in china, incredible ones in the succulent karoo in south africa/namibia, plenty in argentina etc etc), if you know where to look...

anyway OUR HEROS THE BIOCRUST aren't just there to look pretty (though you will can see from photos they also do this :) ), but are a vital component to the dryland ecosystem! They literally hold the soil surface together to prevent erosion, they influence hydrology in terms of rainfall runoff + infiltration, they impact how seeds germinate, they contribute to nutrient cycling and what plant-available compounds are held at the soil surface... like i feel like Tumblr in general has been made aware of how fungi & root networks interact in large scale systems like forests, but that is also happening on a more microscopic level in deserts! just in the top couple centimeters soooo much is happening. Cyanobacteria in particular are tiny organisms that produce little nets of sugars woven in the soil to climb around on and protect themselves, and if you crumble a little bit of soil from the surface you can see how the little spiderweb strings literally hold together the sand particles.

Now that you're Aware of biocrusts, when you look at larger scale landscape photos taken in un-trampled areas of desert, you will notice them as darker patches and textures on the lighter soil:

Yep there's these tiny little communities all over, that many people never learn to see. And now what I said before about mosses & cyanobacteria usually preferring wet environments--they have in fact adapted to life in the desert in ways that means they're dormant for most of the year. They live in stasis until the rainy season hits (or in some cases, winter moisture from a snow layer--many will photosynthesize through a few inches of snow since it's clear/white), and then burst into color and life. Many patches of biocrust will look utterly lifeless and dried out at first and then become vibrant and swell up within a few minutes of being exposed to moisture. Lichens, while more vibrant even when dry, will also mostly only grow/reproduce while wet. And biocrusts come in all sorts of colors, shapes, and preferred microhabitats!

anyway this post is long enough already so i'll be quick. while beautiful and important as you can imagine these are FRAGILE. if they get trampled too much, by humans or cows or cars, that's it. you're back to bare soil that can blow away whenever it wants.

I was lucky to get to participate in a 2x/year survey of one of the very few places in Utah to NEVER have cattle grazing or development, a remote area the entrance is kept secret to inside Canyonlands National Park, where you can see just how dense and lush biocrusts once could be in the US southwest:

ah... glorious. what special little guys. this is why if you visit many of the national parks in Utah you will see signs & stickers around with slogans like "Don't Bust The Crust" and "Tiptoe Through The Crypto" and etc. so heed that advice but DO stop and kneel down and get a better look at them!

[thecatcrew]

Tangerine was so soft and sweet 🍊❤️✨🪽

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Vincent Price circa mid-50's.

[soukokumychildren]

So I was staring at these two images earlier today, because they're my favorite out of all of BSD. In my opinion, the best drawn panels of Soukoku ever drawn. Then I realized something that took me YEARS to realize. I unintentionally caught them at the blue/red (yes its more orange but you get the idea) sort of color scheme and I just sat there. In shock. I wasn't sure how I didn't notice. But uh yeah here you guys go, my favorite images of Dazai and Chuuya lol XD

[floralcavern]

“They were like brothers!”

I’m sorry, how do you act with your brother?? Should I be concerned???

[vulcanette]

📸: @ Panthera_Ferox

[bloodletterbutch]

i need to talk to someone about his acne scarring like its such a small thing but its so beautiful to me like i dont understand why is such a taboo topic,, hes so beautiful i do not understand !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'n

[britneyshakespeare]

this picture of sal vulcano really does have its own sorta je ne sais quoi that not only do i understand why from very early days it has been a staple on impractical jokers but it became a meme outside of that. it's not just like any sort of unflattering pic. it has its own kind of majesty