#this was a weird tag

[cubistemoji]

[beebfreeb]

Messaging people for the first time is so hard. What am I supposed to say? Like, "You seem really odd and your blog intrigues me. Do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters?" What! Whatever. I will just follow you back and stare at your blog with my big beautiful brown eyes.

[zytes]

this manatee looks like it’s in a skyrim loading screen

[beepboopappreciation]

Is this anything

[gibbearish]

love when ppl defend the aggressive monetization of the internet with "what, do you just expect it to be free and them not make a profit???" like. yeah that would be really nice actually i would love that:)! thanks for asking

[planefood]

rules for thee and not for me

[stemmmm]

one more one more

same au thing as last time

[adriles]

they are Cancelling me for dealing with my grief as best i can . also for the vicious war Crimes

[yekokataa]

engagement bait craft videos have gotten so bizarre i think this is legitimately an art form now

[lokh]

communication is key 💪

[beebundt]

(non-sexual nudity) accumulated doodle page with charlie and her gf i never talk abt that she's so in love with. both she/her

[therealraewest]

Laios cuts the tags outta his clothes like an autistic king confirmed

[pansy-placebo]

Have any of you ever heard of the hummingbird moths we get in Britain?

So, I thought I saw a hummingbird last year. It was much bigger than a bug could be, I thought, and it hovered around flowers and looked like it had feathers.

I got pretty close but it was never still enough to see clearly. Then, when I told my parents they said "oh! it was probably a moth!" and I was baffled for a long time. Like, how could a moth look like and act so much like a hummingbird?

Until I googled "hummingbirds in the UK" and this fucker comes up:

Everyone, meet the hummingbird hawk-moth; one of the weirdest and coolest cases of convergent evolution on this planet.

This is the kinda thing I'd see in fiction and go "oooh cool, bug hummingbird! Wish we had those on earth!" But we do. We really do have them on earth!! Isn't that nuts?!?!?

[asexualaromanticautistic]

What if we were the opposites of each other but when you boil us down to the core we are inherently the same (and we were both autistic)

[honeypleasejustkillme]

i thought i was at my lowest but holy shit it gets lower

[reasonsforhope]

This is kind of a weird reason for hope, honestly, but it genuinely changed how I think about catastrophe.

Historical fact that you probably do not know:

At least 30-50% of the population of Pompeii survived.

Maybe even the majority of the people of Pompeii survived.

(The numbers 30-50% there are according Professor J. Theodore Peña, a professor of ancient Roman archeology who studies Pompeii, whom I took a class on Pompeii with in 2018. The numbers of "maybe even the majority" are from articles linked below.)

Yes, that Pompeii, the one where the entire city was swallowed by a volcanic eruption.

And no, I'm not kidding. x, x, x, x, x, x

So how this is possible, that anyone could survive, when the entire city was literally buried in volcanic ash? And the answer is that the eruption actually took place over the course of almost 24 hours, as the earthquakes and clouds of smoke emitting from Pompeii gradually got worse and worse, followed by the ejection of ash and giant stones that gradually escalated, until the fifth pyroclastic flow (aka giant wave of searing hot ash) hit the city.

So, people had a bit less than 24 hours to flee the city. And many of them did, whether by boat or cart or horse or foot. And many of them made it.

Pompeii is the iconic, ultimate example we have, culturally, for a natural disaster that causes complete annihilation.

But it never caused complete annihilation at all. Not of the people who lived there.

I think climate change, ultimately, is going to be like Pompeii. Yes, there will be natural disasters. Yes, it will keep getting worse for a while.

Yes, people will die, and yes, we do need to act fast, and we need to do all that we can to save every single living being that we can.

But unlike the people of Pompeii, we have the ability to fix most of the effects of climate change. We have the ability to cool the planet down from whatever temperature it ultimately hits. (Masterpost on this here.)

Natural disasters fucking suck. But as the true story of Pompeii exemplifies, they are often a lot more survivable than we think. And we have benefits and resources and technology and knowledge above all communication that the people of Pompeii never did - in fact, we're getting so good at building for and detecting and warning for natural disasters that the number of people dying from natural disasters has been plummeting, even as natural disasters are getting worse and worse (x).

We are going to survive climate change (x). We are going to fix as much of it as we can (x). And we are going to rebuild afterward.

Because as the many survivors of Pompeii show, that's what humans do.