Month: July 2017

deadwooddross:

deadwooddross:

if u could genetically modify distinctly non-human things to urself what would u want

holds mic out

three kinds a ppl in this reply bin

1: I want to be mostly human looking but with COOL TEETH

2: I’m a furry

3: I want to completely ditch this humanoid body plan to be a flying nocturnal salamander squid

So what kind of social stigma are we talkin’ in this hypothetical world? 

If body mods are still kinda “eeeh” in social minds, I’ll take night-vision and maybe sharp teeth if it comes with a way to not bite myself in the lip constantly.

If it’s all “NOBODY CARES GO BE WHATEVER”, catch me turning myself into an amphibious dragon-thing w/ bioluminescence and/or color changing abilities and no distinct sex or gender.

andreashettle:

hooligan-nova:

optimysticals:

tethmos:

september-before-a-rainfall:

Jesus.

Look at this, and remember it next time someone says that the gay community survived the AIDS epidemic.

We didn’t survive, we started over. We lost all but an entire generation.

This is what “we survived Reagan, you’ll survive Trump” looks like. No, we didn’t.

The AIDS crisis is a reminder that no matter how cool we are in a moment (like during the height of disco), the instance shit goes south for us cishet people will let us die.

Respectability politics is Russian roulette. 

[Image description: Screenshot of a Tweet by Hanif @hanifleylabi that says “The men in white are the surviving members of the original San Francisco Gay Men’s choir. The rest represent those lost to AIDS.”  In the picture with the tweet, about 120-plus men stand in six rows. Most of the men are in dark suits, facing away from the camera toward the wall. Only seven men face the camera, dressed in bright white shirts. End image description.]

Source: oh-fredrik-what-a-day-its-been

Im always nervous about bat ring membrane. Its so stretchy. Does it not rip?

koryos:

No need to be nervous! Bat wing membrane is much stronger than human-made materials like rubber or plastic; the closest equivalent would probably be silicone. (AKA, the stuff used to make the wings for Bat Bot!) But unlike silicone, bats also have the ability to make their wing membranes stiffer or more flexible using rows of unanchored muscles beneath the skin. So if they happen to run into an obstacle, they can adjust it instantly.

Furthermore, bats have an incredible healing ability when it comes to their wings. They can heal almost any hole or tear, given enough time. Small puncture wounds are actually quite common, but the bats can still fly just fine as long as they’re not TOO big. Broken or fractured bones are much more likely to ground a bat than holes in the wing membrane, as a matter of fact.

Below you can see a western yellow bat with a large number of healed scars on its wing- this is more than you’d usually find, but it shows just how resilient they are!

gallusrostromegalus:

prokopetz:

thesallowbeldam:

momma-crow:

1petulantkitten:

1petulantkitten:

artistil:

weavemama:

BY A WHAT

THATS ALL THE BIG SCARIES IN ONE BUG TFFF
JU

Give it a dime, apparently.

Had to go research this thing, and the answer to what to do if it stings you is scream.

from Wikipedia-

“One researcher described the pain as “…immediate, excruciating, unrelenting pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations. In terms of scale, the wasp’s sting is rated near the top of the Schmidt sting pain index, second only to that of the bullet ant, and is described by Schmidt as “blinding, fierce [and] shockingly electric”.“

Soooooo…dissociate to escape or?

It’s laying eggs in you.

Let’s back up a second and fully appreciate that description.

The Schmidt sting pain index, a widely used classification system for the bites and stings of ants, bees and wasps, is literally the personal ranking system of a guy named Justin Schmidt, who goes around letting bugs sting him for science. Like, that’s this Thing as a scientist.

In one entry, he describes the sting of the common bee as “almost pleasant, [like] a lover just bit your earlobe a little too hard.”

In another, the sting of the yellowjacket is described as “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.“

So when the Schmidt sting pain index characterises the sting of the tarantula hawk as “blinding, fierce [and] shockingly electric”, well, now you know what your standard for comparison is!

So I live in Hawk Wasp Land and I do have some good news:

1. they are the LOUDEST, SLOWEST honking bugs you’ll ever meet, and are easily avoided by listening for the NEEERRRRRRR as they roam around, looking for tarantulas and trying to avoid the ravens.

2. Unless you are a tarantula or a really dedicated entomologist, your odds of being stung are practically no.  They’re looking for some tasty roast arachnid, not sunburnt moron, so unless you somehow you actually catch and encourage one to bite you, it’s not gonna happen

They’re giant blue wasps with bright orange wings, they fly very loudly, and they’re slow. Don’t worry- you aren’t going to get stung by one unless you make it sting you. Which you should not. Please do not.

Source: weavemama

thefreelancerdivision:

thefreelancerdivision:

thefreelancerdivision:

One last thing to consider before sleep consumes me: chubby!clones

Shinies who get assigned to the 501st/212th/104th/327th and are so confused. Why are their brothers are all so much bigger than they are? They can’t all be from command stock, can they? And then, oh gods above, their General hears them asking about it in the mess hall and basically tells them “Oh, yeah, you’ve been chronically underfed your entire lives.”

Like, what. What does that even mean? The Kaminoans all carefully monitor their rations to make sure they’re functioning at optimum levels, how can they be underfed?

So the medic has to take the shinies all aside and explain about caloric intake and metabolic rates and how human bodies store energy and oh! Is that why everyone in the mess looked like they were pulling double rations? They just figured it was a reward for something before they’d all arrived.

And the medic says, nope, that’s the new standard amount of rations, at least under this jetii who actually cares about the health of their brothers. Turns out the Longnecks’ definition of “optimal levels” is the rest of the galaxy’s definition of “just enough so they don’t keel over and die on the battlefield before the clankers get them.” Turns out fatty tissue is a good thing, health-wise, particularly so their bodies don’t immediately start to eat themselves if they get cut off from supply lines somewhere down the line.

The shinies are stunned. So… so their rations won’t get slashed if they start to get that layer of squishiness that happens when they eat more than they nee–more than the Longnecks say they need?

Of course not! Their jetii was shocked when they saw how little the brothers were given to eat, particularly for soldiers who use up so much more energy every day than the average civilian!

So the shinies just sort of stumble back to the mess hall in a daze and stare at their older brothers. It slowly starts to dawn on them how, how healthy they all look. Flushed cheeks, no tightness around their eyes, cheekbones and jawlines softened just a little more than what the shinies are used to seeing. They’re not command stock, they’re just well-fed. Damn, now that they understand, the shinies all look positively starved in comparison.

They all shuffle over into line and grab their rations. Pause. Look around quickly. Exchange furtive glances with each other. Grab another helping.

They move to find a table to sit down but their General, their jetii is suddenly right there, again, and this time they’re saying no, no, this just won’t do at all. The shinies all go pale, wondering how to explain that they weren’t trying to be disobedient–

And then the General is gently ushering them all back into the line to grab yet another portion, cheerfully babbling about the shinies needing to “catch up” with their older brothers, to “put some meat on their bones.”

They all look at one another helplessly until the bravest, or perhaps the dumbest, of them pipes up asking if the General was planning on eating them if supply lines got cut off somewhere down the line. Several identical voices try to cut him off, drown out his insubordination, but the General clearly hears the comment and. And laughs.

Well.

The brothers who all came back from the front to visit them on Kamino always did say that life was very different once you were assigned a General…

Bringin’ the chubby!clones back because I made myself sad and need to be cheered up

systlin:

ella-raene:

systlin:

beautifultoastdream:

systlin:

GUYS THEY FIGURED OUT THE ROMAN CONCRETE RECIPE THAT MAKES IT IMMUNE TO SEAWATER

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mystery-of-2000-year-old-roman-concrete-solved-by-scientists/ar-BBDO5VC

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I KNOW RIGHT?!???

I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”

For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew – and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.

The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.

Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”

Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.

In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right. 

Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that. 

But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again. 

It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt. 

3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down. 

kaminos-saving-grace:

kaminos-saving-grace:

kaminos-saving-grace:

Clone Troopers who would eat raw meat, since the Kaminoans cloned them with very hearty immune systems for a reason and it would save time: Keelie, Hardcase, Fives, Hevy, Cody, Cutup, Comet, Boost, Boil, Dogma, Bly, Gregor, Oddball, 99

Clone Troopers who would not eat raw meat unless it was absolutely necessary no matter what we were cloned with: Rex, Stone, Ponds, Droidbait, Echo, Tup, Gree, Neyo, Sinker, Appo, Waxer, Kix, Thire, Colt

Clone Trooper who refuse to answer this question: Wolffe, Fox

Jedi who would eat raw meat: Ahsoka, Shaak-Ti, Anakin, Quinlan, Kit, Qui-Gon

Jedi who would not: Mace, Depa, Yoda, Aayla, Adi, Stass, Plo, Ki-Adi, Ima-Gun, Barriss, Luminara, Oppo

Jedi who are about to lecture everyone who isn’t a Togruta: Obi-Wan

Star Wars Character who would eat bugs: Anakin

Star Wars Characters who need Anakin to stop: Everyone else.

sneakyfeets:

muscle-horse-appreciation:

soupcitylights:

classicaldreaming:

This horse swam so far out to sea that the water was 10m deep when they found him 😂

WAIT IT GETS BETTER

When he got back on land, he still had enough energy to headbutt his trainers father hard enough to knock him unconscious. His trainer, Brad Smith, had this to say about the horse (ironically called Rebel Rover):

“He’s not the type of horse to strike or kick, head-butting is more his go and he lined dad up and knocked him out cold.”

So this horse goes out and swims 11km in the ocean, has to get herded back in, and when he gets back on land is still energetic enough to knock someone out cold.

Now that’s stamina!

“Rebel Rover had only recently returning to racing after a ban in Victoria for misbehaving in the barriers.” (x)

IS THIS THE ANGRIEST HORSE EVER?? ?

@probablyfakeblonde

Source: sanddancingwithanxiety