#the nature of things

[pratchettquotes]

"It'll all end in trouble, my lord," said Ridcully. He'd found it a good general comment in practically any debate. Besides, it was so often true.

Lord Vetinari sighed. "In my experience, practically everything does," he said. "That is the nature of things. All we can do is sing as we go."

Terry Pratchett, The Truth

[sumfabula]

i’m not religious but there really is something holy about the sunrise. when you leave your curtains open slightly overnight and then the warm rays cast into your room and over your face, you feel blessed. the dark shadows of the night disappear and everything is still for a second. i think you could gain true consciousness in one of those morning moments with that light in yours eyes, blinding you to the real world but showing you whats inside.

i think i'm going to let the sun melt onto me more often from now on. i want to wear that shining gold and carry it whereever i go.

[laresearchette]

Thursday, January 04, 2023 Canadian TV Listings (Times Eastern)

WHERE CAN I FIND THOSE PREMIERES?: ONE NIGHT STAY (BET +) REYKA (BritBox) SANCTUARY: A WITCH'S TALE (Sundance Now/AMC+) THE GOLDEN BACHELOR: THE GOLDEN WEDDING (City TV) 8:00pm THE FIRST 48 (A&E Canada) 8:00pm THE POWER OF FILM (TCM) 8:00pm CASEY ANTHONY'S PARENTS SPEAK: THE LIE DETECTOR TEST (A&E Canada) 9:00pm BARNWOOD BUILDERS (Magnolia Canada) 9:00pm

WHAT IS NOT PREMIERING IN CANADA TONIGHT: GENERAL HOSPITAL: 60 YEARS OF STARS AND STORYTELLING (ABC Feed) SWAMP PEOPLE (Premiering on January 11 on History Canada at 9:00pm) DAUGHTER OF THE CULT (Premiering on January 11 on Disney + Star) SWAMP MYSTERIES WITH TROY LANDRY (TBD - History Canada)

NEW TO AMAZON PRIME CANADA/CBC GEM/CRAVE TV/DISNEY + STAR/NETFLIX CANADA:

NETFLIX CANADA BOY SWALLOWS UNIVERSE (AU) THE BROTHERS SUN SOCIETY OF THE SNOW (ES)

2024 IIHF WORLD JUNIOR CHAMPIONSHIP (TSN4) 5:00am: Relegation: Germany vs. Norway (TSN/TSN3/TSN4/TSN5) 9:00am: Semifinal: Sweden vs. Czechia (TSN/TSN3/TSN4/TSN5) 1:30pm: Semifinal: U.S. vs. Finland

NHL HOCKEY (SNEast/SNOntario) 7:00pm: Penguins vs. Bruins (TSN2) 7:00pm: Sabres vs. Habs (SNPacific) 8:00pm: Canucks vs. Blues (SNWest) 8:00pm: Flames vs. Predators (TSN5) 10:00pm: Sens vs. Kraken (SNEast/SNOntario) 10:30pm: Panthers vs. Knights (TSN3) 10:30pm: Jets vs. Sharks

NBA BASKETBALL (SN1) 7:30pm: Bucks vs. Spurs (SN1) 10:00pm: Nuggets vs. Warriors

DRAGONS’ DEN (CBC) 8:00pm: A West Coast duo arrives with precious cargo; an Ontario business owner freshens up the Den; an entrepreneur revamps the Dragons' credit cards; a West Coast entrepreneur puts a new spin on an old product.

ALMOST PARADISE (CTV2) 8:00pm (SEASON PREMIERE): A local priest is murdered over a long-lost ancient cross, the cross which Magellan held in his hand the day he was killed by Lapu-Lapu in the Battle of Mactan.

HEARTLAND DOCS, DVM (Nat Geo Canada) 8:00pm (SEASON PREMIERE): The Schroeders scramble to save a farm dog after it ate rat poison.

THE NATURE OF THINGS (CBC) 9:00pm (SEASON PREMIERE): The human voice is a very sophisticated communication tool, but most lack knowledge of how to unlock its potential.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT HOUSE? (HGTV Canada) 9:00pm (SEASON PREMIERE): A New York couple overwhelmed by their water problems are ready to bring in professionals to correct them for good; Joe Mazza discovers the source of their issues while designer Noel Gatts takes their Cape Cod home from cluttered to classic.

SUPERCHEF GRUDGE MATCH (Food Network Canada) 9:00pm (SEASON PREMIERE): Darnell Ferguson welcomes four culinary masters to settle their turf wars. Matt Klum calls out former boss Dana Downs to prove she made a huge mistake letting him go, while Danny Wilson challenges Jay Ducote in a battle of Southern cuisine supremacy.

THE GHOST TOWN TERROR (DTour) 9:00pm (SEASON PREMIERE): Karen calls Tim and Sapphire back to Gunslinger Gulch to investigate a shocking, fire-branded omen; when Tim repels deeper into The Pit for answers, a confrontation with his own dark nemesis leads to painful revelations about the living and the dead.

CANADA'S DRAG RACE (Crave) 9:00pm

MARRIED TO REAL ESTATE (HGTV Canada)10:00pm/11:00pm (SEASON PREMIERE): A couple living with their two children and mother are bursting at the seams and want a bigger home with character; Egypt and Mike find the right place in Roswell and look to turn the sterile house into a dream with a new kitchen and yoga studio. In Episode Two, with behind-the-scene details and never-before-seen footage, Egypt and Mike revisit their favorite family renovations, including an old family home turned into a chic short-term rental, to refreshing a Southern-charm haven.

LAST OF THE GIANTS (Discovery Canada) 10:00pm (SEASON PREMIERE): Cyril Chauquet and his team are dropped into the middle of the wildest environments on the planet with the sole mission of collecting vital specimens that could save species from extinction.

A HOME AWAY (Magnolia Canada) 10:00pm (SERIES PREMIERE): Harrison House is a 130-year-old Victorian bed and breakfast that Bryan and Catherine are converting into a boutique hotel; the plan is for a quick renovation, but they soon find out that they're in for a challenge.

CANADIAN REFLECTIONS (CBC) 11:30pm: Shallots & Garlic; Promotion

[colorpandora]

Why are the girlbots back......

[colorpandora]

Op you clearly love your pokemon very very much and it warms my heart. I am reminded of how the only reason I used a bewear on my team in Moon was because someone drew an image of one crying in the rain and captioned it with "I hate this stupid fucking thing it's ugly and pathetic and creepy and weird!!!!!!" and I was so taken aback by the cruelty of this person that I had to use one. She kicked so so much ass.

please let me introduce you to NeverHappy, my most beloved pokemon ever.

i found her as a budew on someone else’s save file after buying a used copy of pokemon platinum. the name “NeverHappy” was a pretty obvious joke about how budew evolves from happiness, and since the previous owner was going to keep her in a box forever, never use her, and never evolve her, she would never be happy. this activated some feral response in my brain and i decided no. she WOULD be happy. i was still replaying through all my old gen 4 games at the time but i traded her off to my other gen 4 files for safekeeping until i could do stuff with her.

oh trust me game. i would.

so you might have thought my plans were to simply evolve her and beat the game with her, get her to level 100, maybe even EV train her - but i had much bigger plans. i was going to ribbon master her. the ribbon master challenge, or the process of “ribbon mastering” a pokemon, is getting every single ribbon possible on a pokemon from the game it was caught in to the most recent game it can be transferred to. if you weren’t aware, that’s a LOT of ribbons. there are 40 in gen 4 alone. i had a lot to do.

(the above clean screenshot was taken by backing up my cartridge save and screenshotting a battle video in emulator. however, i did all of this on my actual DS! i don’t like playing on emulator. not as fun)

i had to beat every contest (normal-master rank in all 5 categories) and do a bunch of other random stuff but my favorite part of the process was defeating the battle tower… 6 times. the battle frontier contains the most challenging battles in gen 4 by far, as opponents have good stats and competitive movesets. there’s 6 battle tower ribbons in gen 4 - two for singles at different points in the win streak, one for doubles, one for multis /w NPCs, one for multis /w another player (i just played with myself on two dses), and one for ranking up in the wi-fi room, which is now accessible again due to fan servers restoring internet functionality for gens 4 and 5.

NeverHappy was randomly caught in the wild and did not have a competitive nature or stats, so i figured that she would just be tagging along in the back while i took out all the win streaks with 2 good pokemon, but she ended up clutching out wins in times of dire need… multiple times. she even ended up being necessary in the wi-fi room to stall out prevalent hacked pokemon like no guard sheer cold machamp, which hits 1 hit KO moves every time, with a gimmicky and convoluted leech seed + substitute strategy.

i could go into all of my team members and the excessive lengths i went to get them all (don’t even get me started on my shiny competitive latias from pokemon emerald) but that’s a story for another day.

by the end of gen 4 i was extremely emotionally attached and she was already becoming one of my favorite pokemon, now with 40 whole ribbons after days and weeks of effort.

i have ribbon mastered pokemon before, so all of my save files in gens 6, 7, and 8 were already set up to transfer neverhappy into and grab all of the ribbons. i had a lot more battling and little tasks ahead of me. it’s really cool how ribbon mastering forces you to interact with pretty much every feature of every pokemon game.

and so i transferred her! gen 5 doesn’t have any ribbons, so it was just an intermediary to transfer into gen 6. at this point, i had also acquired a shiny luxray from pokeradar chaining in platinum named Nightlight, and i was ribbon mastering them together, but once again, a story for another day.

first into gen 6… getting the super training ribbon was really annoying but the battle maison was pretty easy. i had a team in multis with terrakion and a whimsicott with beat up that could 1 hit KO all of the boss battle’s legendaries in one hit LOL

then gen 7… this one went by pretty quickly but i opted to get the best friends ribbon here instead of in XY or ORAS because it was really simple to get with rainbow pokebeans, since all you have to do is max out affection and it only takes a couple rainbow beans to do that in USUM.

and gen 8! you can see nightlight to the left in this picture. by far the hardest part of gen 8 was getting the ribbon awarded for winning a battle in master rank in online VGC against other players. i definitely had to grind that one for a while.

then, she even got an award in BDSP for being a pokemon originating from the original diamond/pearl/platinum games, which was really cool.

oh, and since i had cloned neverhappy back in gen 4 with a glitch so that i would always have a copy of her in her origin games, i was able to take this neat picture! how the times have changed LMAO

luckily she was even a part of PLA’s roster and i was able to take a picture with her there, too… which actually might end up being important since there’s an invisible flag somewhere in the game’s code that gets turned on when you take a picture with your pokemon in the photo studio, which could potentially become a ribbon in the future in another game.

so, trainer Platina from 2016, you were wrong! NeverHappy is in fact happy now and has done more than most people’s pokemon have seen in their entire lifetime. she is my most cherished pokemon and i love her more than i love myself. i think i would die for her

i abbreviated this story a lot because i didn’t want to make this post longer than it already was but i was randomly inspired to talk about this today since SV is coming out soon and there will be more ribbons to collect for any of my ribbon masters that can be transferred into SV, which got me thinking about her. my journey with ribbon mastering has taught me more about pokemon games than any normal person should ever know and if you were interested in any details i left out or how i accomplished certain ribbons (including battle frontier strategies) feel free to shoot me an ask! :D i love talking about pokemon at any time any day of the week.

[good-to-drive]

All this about not getting to see John Lennon on twitter but I think the real tragedy is that Freddie Mercury never had an instagram

[a-hollow-forest]

"people show their true colours in life threatening situations" no, they show you what they act like when they're mortally terrified, an emotion notorious for literally turning your entire brain off to the point where people who go into those situations as a profession need to be literally trained on how to not have that happen

[brawley1492]

Which was the first planet to have?

"Crater impacts" in the Cosmos?

"Mother"

Why were crater impacts so important to you?

Ah, The Nature of things ... William

[doom-dreaming]

"when i was your age, i was working three jobs to help support my family" and "when i was in college i was sleeping on a mattress on the floor and living off of soup"

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE HAD TO DO THAT. NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO DO THAT. I DON'T KNOW HOW TO EXPLAIN TO YOU THAT THIS ISN'T A CHARACTER-BUILDING LESSON, IT'S JUST BAD

[romeclipse]

hearts in trees ♡

[spookyasmr]

[pc-98s]

i highly recommend developing an intense interest in some natural phenomenon or creature such as bugs or stars or mushrooms. you will be delighted every time you go outside

[aplpaca]

Do you have any cool bird facts

female raptors (eagles, hawks, falcons, etc) are larger than male raptors in pretty much all species. this happens even in groups not closely related to each other (ex: hawks and falcons), so its beneficial enough in their niche that its evolved independently a few times, though its unsure exactly what that benefit is atm (bc unlike males being larger in a lot of mammals, female raptors dont make a habit of fighting each other or using size to attract mates as far as we know). ex: heres a male and female Cooper's Hawk

somewhat mentioned above but falcons are more closely related to parrots than they are to hawks

Gray Catbirds and American Robins have been witnessed raising young in the same nest at the same time. In one instance (reported by Mulvihill and Murray), they were recorded caring for the young of both species in the nest, and when the Catbird young fledged, the adult Catbirds continued to provide food for the not-yet-fledged Robins. heres a pic of the nest from the report

the worlds oldest known bird as of 2024 is a wild Laysan Albatross named Wisdom who's 72-73 years old (at minimum, we dont actually know her birth date, just that she was at least 5 years old when she was banded in the 50s) and still raising chicks. here's her with one of her chicks

also Albatrosses have wingspans of up to 3.5m/11.5ft and have been recorded flying 49,700 miles without touching land (they do land in the water to eat tho)

this is from personal experience but if you walk around in a north american grassland for long enough, you Will get jumpscared by a Mourning Dove bc they make their nests on the ground in the grass and like to hang out on the ground in the grass and they also like to wait until youre right overtop of them to freak out and fly away from you

Bald Eagles don't get their fully white heads and tails until theyre about 5 years old

A lot of birds have been observed incorporating cigarette butts into their nests, and a study in Mexico on House Finches found that this actually results in drastic decreases in parasites affecting young compared to nests without them

Cedar Waxwings (and Waxwings in general) just look so smooth. they look like someone airbrushed them. look at this shit

in Jacanas, females lay eggs in multiple males' nests, and then the males raise the young by themself. Also they carry their babies under their wings like this

Horned Guan. Theyre endangered and live in a small area of central america. both the males and females have the little horn fez, the males just have taller ones

[laresearchette]

Friday, March 17, 2023 Canadian TV Listings (Times Eastern)

WHERE CAN I FIND THOSE PREMIERES?: EXTRAPOLATIONS (Apple TV +) MONSTER FACTORY (Apple TV +) BOSTON STRANGLER (Disney + Star) LEAVE (Shudder) POWER BOOK II: GHOST (Starz Canada) 10:00pm WHAT IS NOT PREMIERING IN CANADA TONIGHT? NANNY DEAREST  (TBD - Lifetime Canada) PUT A RING ON IT (TBD - OWN Canada)

NEW TO AMAZON PRIME CANADA/CBC GEM/CRAVE TV/DISNEY + STAR/NETFLIX CANADA:

AMAZON PRIME CANADA ANGEL FLIGHT CLASS OF ‘07 DOM (Season 2) DETECTIVE KNIGHT: INDEPENDENCE LAST LIGHT THE NIGERIAN TRADE SWARM

CBC GEM FAIT DIVERS (Season 3 and 4) I AM SYD STONE

CRAVE TV THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 DANGEROUS LIAISONS (198) A DOLPHIN TALE JUST FOR LAUGHS 2022: THE GALA SPECIALS — CHELSEA HANDLER THE MAURITANIAN POWER BOOK II: GHOST (Season 3) SEE HOW THEY RUN SPIDER-MAN SPIDER-MAN 2 SPIDER-MAN 3 SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING

DISNEY + STAR BONO AND THE EDGE: A SORT OF HOMECOMING WITH DAVE LETTERMAN BOSTON STRANGLER

NETFLIX CANADA AGENT ELVIS DANCE 100 IN HIS SHADOW MAESTRO IN BLUE THE MAGICIAN’S ELEPHANT NOISE SKY HIGH: THE SERIES

NCAA MEN’S BASKETBALL (TSN/TSN5) 12:00pm: March Madness: First Round (TSN)  6:00pm: March Madness: First Round (TSN4) 10:00pm: March Madness: First Round

NCAA WOMEN’S BASKETBALL (TSN3) 12:00pm - 10:00pm: March Madness: First Round

MLB BASEBALL (SN) 1:00pm: Phillies vs. Jays

TENNIS (TSN2) 6:00pm: WTA 1000 Tennis: Indian Wells - Semifinals (TSN2) 9:00pm: WTA 1000 Tennis: Indian Wells - Semifinals

WBC BASEBALL (SN) 7:00pm: Quarter-Final #3

NHL HOCKEY (SN1) 7:00pm: Sabres vs. Flyers (TSN4) 7:00pm: Hurricane vs. Leafs (SN1) 10:00pm: Blue Jackets vs. Ducks

NBA BASKETBALL (SN Now) 7:30pm: Warriors vs. Hawks (SN Now) 10:30pm: Mavericks vs. Lakers

MARKETPLACE (CBC) 8:00pm: Retail Tricks / Buzzkill: Balloons: Testing the sizing of jeans; putting the safety of motorcycle helmets to the test; and eco-friendly alternatives to balloons. Reporters: Rosa Marchitelli/Charlsie Agro

STREET OUTLAWS: FASTEST IN AMERICA (Discovery Canada) 8:00pm (SEASON PREMIERE): The title of Fastest in America is up for grabs with new teams, new cars and new rules; the eight captains each choose two drivers to compete in a 16-car bracket; the goal is to go fast, stack cash and be the last driver standing.

PUSH (CBC) 8:30pm: Relationship drama finds Bean as the Wheelie Peeps bring it to the runway. Brian says a hard goodbye to a past life.

THE NATURE OF THINGS (CBC) 9:00pm: War for the Woods: Thirty years after historic logging protests on Vancouver Island, the battle to protect old growth forests is still raging.

THE SPENCER SISTERS (CTV) 9:00pm: Darby and Victoria are hired by a former schoolmate of Darby's to investigate acts of vandalism at his winery.

THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF DURBAN (Slice) 9:00pm: LaConco discusses her high-profile relationship with Mabusi.

THE MAURITANIAN (Crave) 9:00pm:  A defense attorney, her associate and a military prosecutor uncover a far-reaching conspiracy while investigating the case of a suspected 9/11 terrorist imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for six years.

CRIME BEAT (Global) 10:00pm: The Hired Hit: When former beauty queen Alexandra Pesic is gunned down in a brazen daylight shooting on a midsummer evening in 1992, a quiet community in a suburb of Vancouver, B.C. is stunned; evidence of a contract killing is found motivated by greed and hate.

[colorpandora]

At least the girlbots have pronouns in bio