#we've all got our things

[iamthecomet]

Whenever I start to think I'm INSANE for having such a thing for Dew/unmasked Dew I just remember I had a co-worker who thought Guy Fieri was the hottest man she'd ever seen.

She got R E A L turned on watching him bite burgers. Liked it when the grease ran down his chin.

And I mean I can get that part. I appreciate it.

But, I'm still hung up on "there is no hotter man than guy fieri"

Makes me feel a tiny bit better about drooling over demon tongue.

[navree]

i hate the age of innocents but daniel day lewis is really hot in that movie

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Do you like sci-fi and indie animation? Check out Monkey Wrench!

[loxare]

do i.. WANT to know about the drumlins?

YES YOU DO

Drumlins are glacial landforms, which means you find them only in places that have been glaciated. And they're very distinct when you know what you're looking for.

A hill with one steep side, one looooong sloping side, and you've (most likely) got yourself a drumlin. (Unless it's small. Drumlins are tens of meters high and hundreds of meters long, so if you've got a short one with way more elongation, you've got a drumlinoid.) They're all over Canada,the north eastern US, and northern Europe. The one pictured above is in Ireland. The ones in Canada and the US formed as the Laurentide Ice Sheet, a kilometers thick mass of glacial ice, was spreading across North America during the Last Glacial Maximum

There are lots of really cool glacial landforms (eskers and kames and lakes (Glacial Lake Agassiz my beloved) and like a dozen types of moraine), but drumlins are my favourite because they're so incredibly easy to identify, they occur in swarms, and they're kinda weird as hell

There's still some debate among geomorphologists about how, exactly, they form but I was told that the (mindbogglingly huge mass of) ice catches on a sticky uppy bit of bedrock and instead of mowing it down like a child kicking over a stack of blocks, moves around it instead. And because there's now a place behind the bedrock where there's less ice, the ice drops a whole bunch of glacial till (all the bits of sediment that did get mowed down like a child kicking over a stack of blocks) on the other side of the bedrock bit

(This is a constructional theory, where the drumlin is built up. the other main one is the erosional theory, where everything but the drumlin is eroded. There's also a theory that drumlins are deposited by subglacial meltwater, but that one is highly controversial)

"Now wait," I hear you say, "go back a bit. What the fuck was that about swarms?"

They occur in swarms.

If you've got one drumlin, good chances you've got a lot of drumlins. Which is actually amazing, because the steep side of the drumlin faces the direction of flow, which means we know exactly how the ice sheet moved. In this image, for example, the ice started at the top, near Lake Ontario, and then moved south. From looking at drumlins (and other glacial landforms, we do like to have multiple reference points), we know that the Laurentide Ice Sheet started in the Hudson Bay and crept out from there

And because they're so distinct (tear drop shaped, made of till, occur in swarms), and because drumlins can only have been made by glacial activity, we can look all over the world and find these things and know that this place was once under several thousand tonnes of ice

Not during the Last Glacial Maximum, but definitely ones before it. And I just think that's neat

[starlightvld]

The thing we all need to remember

--And this is VERY important--

is that Soap's neck is THICC.

[rabidpomeranians]

An unorthodox approach to troll reproduction

It’s blood.

Its always been blood, and we’ve all been fooled by our own preconceived notions of how reproduction works. We were given a fill in the blank riddle and got it so wrong that the thousands of fanfics that reference it stand now as a monument to our presumptuousness.

It’s the easiest bodily fluid to get a literal bucket full of quickly. It contains DNA that can be recombined with a partners and utilized by the mother grub. It keeps pairs of any sex/gender viable. And it weirdly explains why rainbowdrinkers are a thing...

First debunking the other possibilities:

From a human perspective the answers to troll reproduction that immediately come would be A) Two sexes with matched-set gemetes, B) All genetically male, or C) Hermaphrodites. Which all come with contradictions.

A) If individuals only produce sperm or eggs, than a statistically significant number of all pairs would be non productive. Given trolls have no concern over the viability of same sex quadrants, there must be a different mechanic in use.

B) If all trolls produce only sperm cells than there would be no mechanism for genetic mixing between individuals. In fact there would be no point in pairing/quadrants at all. Their social system would match ants or bees which forgo reproductive activity outside of one to one interactions with their queen.

Since its been stated that the viability of offspring is effected by the strength of a pair, we know that pairing is a crucial element. Also if trolls are all genetically male, than binary gender has little to no reason to exist (unless sex and gender are also conceptually divorced, which is another theory).

C) The hardest one to knock and the most popular for it. I guess I would pose the question why, in a strongly individualist society, would people form pairs to do what they could technically do all on their own? Or at least why would ‘self-pairing’ not be more common. Sure, pairing allows for more variety but if the gametes paired randomly, half of the resulting mix would still be self fertilized anyways. 

Ok but what does blood have to do with anything like this?

The fundamental flaw that lies over all three answers and probably several more is that we’ve applied human physiology to an alien species. Yes they look similar but their quadrants and mother grubs are vastly different from our monogamy and individually assigned reproductive organs.

Blood mixing negates sex pairing issues, allowing any two individuals to produce offspring. It allows for genetic recombination, given it contains plenty of dna and possibly beneficial hormones produced from the emotional virility of a pair. Lastly, it necessitates pairing. Mixed and unmixed blood have some kind of fundamental difference, which disallows an individual from self-pairing.

I’d chalk it up to something with the immune system. It’s like how in humans certain blood types mixing causes an immune response. Which inside of a body is horrible because it bursts the blood cells, but in an external mix, bursting cells leave exposed dna, allowing for easier recombination. The ‘dominant’ blood type (immunologically, not caste related) dismantles and assimilates the ‘recessive’ producing a viable ‘genetic slurry’ to be hauled off to the mother grub.

And there is plenty of room for the social taboo behavior exhibited by trolls throughout the comic. Trolls live on a hell planet where everything, and everyone, everywhere is looking for an opportunity to kill them, all the time. Thus advertising that you’ve recently lost a half gallon of blood and are vulnerable because of it, would be really stupid. It makes sense then, to keep talk down and hide away any evidence. This evolves pretty seamlessly into a close enough match to the typical cagey/secretive behavior humans tend to show around their own reproductive activities. Hence why we perceive a parallel even though the reasoning is different.

tldr: We all assume that trolls connect sex with reproduction because that’s what we do, but they’re aliens, they do weird alien things. If their biology worked exactly like ours, they wouldn’t have a big weird moth laying eggs for them. Also you’re welcome.

[anghraine]

The English class I teach just finished a unit on literary criticism, and one of the things we talked about was the distinction between criticism in the sense of literary criticism/critical thinking and criticism in the more common sense of criticizing things.

I think the distinction is important, and it's important to take the next step, too. Nobody is obliged to like anything or not to recognize its flaws. But pointing out flaws is often the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to engaging with a text—the quickest, easiest approach to take.

For many, it's quite easy to default to kneejerk critical reactions (in the common sense) without thinking them through or seeing any need to do so. That isn't just different from critical thinking; it's the opposite of it and actively impedes it.

I've often seen this in creative writing workshops. People typically are much readier to point out real or imagined flaws than to think through what the text is aiming for and how the author's choices aid or inhibit it. When workshop students encounter a very good piece, they often don't know how to respond and will resort to comfortable nitpicking or simply "I don't see anything wrong with this," as if finding wrong things is the sole purpose of a workshop.

But the idea that thinking critically about things = criticizing or condemning them seems to loom even larger over literary criticism and reviews and fandom meta and all sorts of things. Identifying and analyzing flaws can be part of critical responses (in the lit-crit sense) and often are. I am personally not at all hesitant about pointing out flaws when I see them or connecting them to more general interpretations. But critical thinking does not begin or end with pointing out flaws and it's entirely possible for critical thinking about a piece to result in an even greater conviction that it's wildly successful in its aims and as a piece of art.

I was partly thinking about this because of the common insistence that it's okay for people to like things (thank you, kindly overlord!) as long as they also think critically about them. But "think critically" here almost always seems to mean "as long as you point out its flaws every time you mention it and your actual overall opinion about it is ambivalent at best." The goal doesn't seem to be for others to ever have a reaction like, "I stopped and thought deeply about how it's crafted and what it's doing, and thanks! Now I have a fuller understanding of how spectacularly well it accomplishes its artistry."

It's fine to be ambivalent about things and point out flaws, as I said before, but a) it doesn't take critical thinking to do that alone, and b) it's not required for someone to feel and do that to be thinking critically about something.

[loodppaz]

been thinkin about all the cheap diy folks did in alt scenes back in the day, and now i’m imagining Eddie calling Steve out of nowhere on a day off

“Hey, do you have any kool-aid? Like, the packets? Specifically Cherry. Oh, and the blue one, berry-something-or-other.”

Steve is confused but checks his cabinets to find that he does, indeed, have those flavours

“Sweet, could you bring ‘em over? See you in 10, bye!”

Still confused, Steve does as asked, and pulls up to Eddie’s place with kool-aid packets in hand, knocks on the door, and Eddie comes out

BLONDE

[yenpondering]

Entitled customers are funny, imagine kicking up such a fuss with our managers that 2 mall security guards had to be called to come mediate all because you and your wife not only can't read but also can't see that our menu literally serves soft poached egg, not a boiled egg, in our Japanese rice bowls

Anyway read the menu properly y'all and ask questions if you're unsure, don't be a dick to hospitality workers especially over dumb shit

[hella1975]

there's a very specific kind of vibe that comes with living with your friends in final year that it just does not have in first year or even second year. like as a fresher it's usually the first time any of you have lived away from home let alone with SO MANY people your age and it's terrifying and exciting and randomised to boot so it's generally carnage for a whole year in the best and worst ways, and then second year you pick who you're living with and it feels like for the first time you're doing this adult thing PROPERLY. you have a place of your own now. these are the people you've chosen to live with. studying gets serious etc. but it's still fresh. it's still new. you still don't know how to navigate it. but final year? final year is when you actually get it right. you know how to manage your time better. you know what works for you and what doesn't. studying is the main focus and you've been out in the world for three years now and it's not loud and boisterous like it was in first year and you're not exciteable and awkward like you were in second year. you're comfortable. every single one of my flatmates has their own friend group and we mainly keep to our own social circles, but we'll still meet each other back at the house after a night out and sit in the kitchen or my room to do the debrief. sometimes i'll go days not seeing either of them despite sharing a house but every now and then someone will softly call up the stairs that 'the heating's on!' or one of us will sneeze and the other two will yell 'bless you!' through the walls. the lack of interaction isn't interpreted as dislike in ways it would have been even last year, because we're all just old enough to be past that now and settled enough in our friendship not to worry about it. idk. uni is very loud and unsettling a lot of the time so it's been really sweet to see how almost boringly comfortable final year is.

[lee-blogs]

Still packing stuff and now i'm looking for a box for this.

My dad and i made it a few years ago for halloween, probably 2015/16 if i'm remembering right. It's made from a lays can, a wipes container from his work, and paper maché. I don't remember what the wires and front metal bits are from, but the middle actually lights up! It has one of those long battery-powered emergancy lights in it and some colored tissue paper

[jyou-no-sonoko19]

『Not so resurrected now, are you?』

[aeide-thea]

i forgot to write this down when i first heard about it so now the details are fuzzy (and honestly it was never going to be as funny/wild to any of you as it was to me), but for some reason i was just reminded of it, so. have this Familial Anecdote:

my dad and i were talking the other day about driving to maine,¹ iirc because Baby Sister had sent us a zillow listing for a cottage there,² and in the course of this conversation it came out that, in a turn of events i had somehow never heard about in literal decades of Dad Stories, he and my mother had apparently decided at some point in their unrecognizably spontaneous youth to Drive to Maine because they were 'already close,'³ and because this was in, like, the eighties, i.e. a time before google maps, they wildly underestimated the time this trip was going to take and got there at, like, two in the morning… but as it turned out this wasn't actually a problem because, as it so happens, the l.l. bean store stays open. fucking. 24 hours a day.⁴ so it all worked out fine in the end: they still got to go shopping!⁵

⸻ ¹ not 'talking about' as in 'actually planning to,' to be clear, just 'talking about' as in 'discussing what it's like to.' ² Baby Sister likes to windowshop zillow listings in her spare time, it's a whole Thing. i hear she's not alone in this tho. ³ narrator: they were not, in fact, close… i forget exactly where he said they were starting from, but i think it was, like, boston-ish. lol. lmao. &c. ⁴ you may have already been aware of this fact and thus be totally unfazed by this anecdote but for me it was like. double whammy of absolutely unrecognizable parental behavior, topped off with place i would possibly least expect to be open around the clock???? (also now i am envisioning a like. mixed-up files remix where they're hiding out in an REI or something. eating the tinned provisions and sleeping in the tents.) ⁵ what, if anything, was actually purchased on this occasion is outside the scope of this narrative.

[deathlygristly]

I don't really want to be Serious right now, but...

Work is really really busy because summer is our busy time. Which I see other people being like ah, May, it's spring! It's summer here already, so I should probably start taking three water bottles to work again because I was sweating today on the second floors of the properties. It'll be close to 90 tomorrow.

I had a dentist appointment today and they took X-rays and I was very brave about it but there were so many things in my mouth and I hate things being in my mouth. I woke up a bit too early from the gallbladder removal surgery and there was still something in my mouth and I remember immediately just pulling it out. And yes, I paid for it with severe throat pain for a few hours afterwards. I cannot stand weird and wrong and claustrophobic sensory feelings in my mouth.

There was a lot of traffic and people going slower than the speed limit and people not watching for other cars at all in roundabouts and just general traffic stress.

I am so backed up on pic editing and uploading tours and I only have two days and then I am on vacation, and emails keep coming in demanding boxes and pics for properties that are so far away and require so much driving and owners being so precious about all the pics they want, including pics of things just near the property.

And on top of all this my brother decided to get emo about my mother's memory issues today and he keeps texting me and texting me and I am like, look, I love my mother but also she's a big part of the reason I dealt with PTSD and anxiety for 20 years and I feel really weird when she texts me wanting to solve things for her and now you're also just ripping away at me and tearing me apart and demanding demanding demanding and just....

I want to rest. I want to hug the spousal person, the only person I know IRL who doesn't constantly demand me for things and who doesn't rely on me for everything and who actually listens to me and cares about me and sees me as a person, not just a problem solver and filler of endless emotional needs.

Saw a poll about "burnt out gifted kid" on here and the answers were so far removed from my experience. What if you were identified as gifted when you were seven, a few months after your father died, and then your family depended on you to think and feel for them and to solve all their problems forever afterwards?

[mantisgodsdomain]

Huh. Looked at some statistics today. We appear to be very, very close to being the single person who has posted the most individual fics to Bug Fables' AO3 page.

[thethingything]

I really don't like our brain's ability to jump from "I'm going to organise all this stuff and catch up with a bunch of tasks" to "it's time to get stuck in an increasingly distressing thought spiral for several hours, accidentally trigger yourself, then feel like shit because you haven't done anything but also haven't managed to rest".

like please can we maybe have like a nice middleground where we do a few things and then rest for a while and don't experience the full range of human emotions over the course of about 3 hours