carefully collected trinkets

Happy Birthday Big Bill!

funny you should mention that

Scrolled past this agakn and just can't get over how much I love it. We need to make things beautiful again and this is such a wonderful example. The beadwork on the wires of a utitarian object, contrasted with the grey concrete.

they call me a master baiter because im very good at worming my fishing hook in a clean and efficient way that keeps the worm attached and secure. what, you thought i was gonna make a joke about masturbating ? hm. how crude. fish army kill them badly

now thats what i call a fucking car

???

ولا بنساك يا بلادي، يا ارضي وارض اجدادي🍉🫒

You can get these as prints here

"Fears that Nebraska’s annual spring migration of sandhill cranes could be the avian equivalent of a “superspreader” event have been completely abated, as a record-setting stopover in Nebraska of thousands of birds was enjoyed without any sign of a bird flu outbreak.

Three-quarters of a million cranes migrating north to their spring habitat landed in the Platte River in Nebraska. The number is deemed an underestimation, but you try counting more than 700,000 birds.

Fears that the highly contagious new strain of bird flu H5N1 could carry over to the cranes from livestock have been assuaged as the birds are beginning to move off again without a single dead crane being observed, local news reports.

Aside from the mini celebration of bird flu’s absence, the real celebration—that this year was the largest on-record for the sandhill crane migration—can begin.

The official estimate of 738,000 animals was made during aerial surveys by the Crane Trust, a nonprofit whose raison d’etre is to protect these magnificent birds and this unforgettable spectacle.

Pictured: Crane migration in Nebraska

These cranes have been visiting an 80-mile-long stretch of the Platte River, braided in some sections, for 9 million years, which these days lies between the towns of Chapman and Overton, Nebraska.

“What makes the central Platte River valley attractive to sandhill cranes is the river that we help manage,” says Matt Urbanski, a spokesman for the Crane Trust, to KSNB’s Madison Smith. “We will make sure that there’s not a ton of vegetation choking the river out. We’ll make sure that it can widen, so the sandhill cranes have six to eight inches of water to sit in during the nighttime.”

The sandhill crane stands between 3 and 4 feet tall, and is easily identifiable for its crown of red feathers and their rattling bugle-like call. It is one of only 2 species of crane that live in North America...

Interestingly, though the cranes have visited this site for eons, they did so even before there was a river there. Additionally, they now spend much of their time feeding on spare corn kernels leftover from nearby harvests, and spend the night standing in the water where they’re safe from predators.

Arrivals and departures are staggered over several weeks, but at peak stopover, it’s one of the great sights of natural America.

“There is nothing else like it in the world,” says Marcos Stoltzfus, director of the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary in Gibbon, Nebraska, to News Channel Nebraska."

-via Good News Network, April 3, 2025

If you live in the USA, you can use this easy widget from the National Humanities Alliance to send a message to your elected representatives asking them to protect the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which has been targeted by DOGE for a clawback of current grant funds and for staffing cuts up to 90%. The widget provides a template email and automatically looks up the addresses of your reps.

The NEH is the only federal entity charged with making the humanities accessible to all. You can visit the site below to see the impact of NEH-funded projects locally and nationally (feel free to cite one in your message).

executive dysfunction is literally like. ive had a random dollar on my floor for two weeks and i dont know when ill fit it in my schedule to pick it up. people dont realize this

picked up the doler👍

What are you even supposed to eat for dinner

And it’s like. Like it’s everyday girls.

In terms of science communication and space exploration advocacy, Elon Musk has sent us back into the fucking Stone Age.

It’s hard enough to encourage the public to see the value in space exploration, especially when the problems facing society right now are so intense that space exploration seems frivolous and needlessly expensive by comparison (keyword “seems”) but now that this clown is the face of the future of space, it’s doubling, hell, tripling down on the idea that space exploration is a fantasy for bored billionaires that would rather fuck off to mars and escape the problems of earthly society (problems that they had a starring role in creating) rather than spend a penny of their wealth to help remedy them. Tale as old as time for a science communicator. Heard it a million times. But now it’s so much harder to get people to understand the other side of the coin because the nightmare scenario is already here and his name is elongated muskrat

To add a little bit of context as to what that value actually is… The thing I hear the most in this conversation is “we need to take care of this planet before we start thinking about other ones.” Yes, I agree. The well-being of our planet and it’s people should be out top priority. But we can’t properly take care of our planet if we don’t fully understand it.

The Earth does not exist in a bubble. It’s part of a dynamic and ever-evolving solar system, and galaxy and universe. He have to look at the earth in that context to be able to know and care for it. To care for a planet, we have to know how planets work. When doctors treat patients they look at the medical record, they look at family history, they look at symptoms and compare them to known diseases to find a diagnosis.

How did the earth form? What was it like in the past? Why did it change? That’s the medical record.

We’ve got the earths siblings in the neighborhood. Why is Mars a frozen desert? Why is Venus a molten hell scape? Could those things happen here? That’s the family history.

What kinds of things are floating around our neighborhood? Could they affect us? All this is necessary to diagnose the Earths problem, to anticipate the direction it’s going, and to help it heal.

And the minute we get an asteroid scare, that’s when folks start asking why we weren’t looking up 🙄

As a science communicator at a well known establishment, 10000x this. We have a student program that talk about Earth systems and how missions like Landsat were so useful to understand our own planet better FROM SPACE. I could go on and on but just, like, reread OP's thoughts, they're perfect.

you've all gotta stop acting like "overweight" is a gentle PC alternative for the word fat and not itself an assertion of the ontological wrongness of being large. Over What Weight Precisely

“how did you get into writing” girl nobody gets into writing. writing shows up one day at your door and gets into you

"how did you get into writing" girl i've been tormented by the visions since i was eight years old

Why are you lgbtq+? wrong answers only GO

Daily fucking reminder that Luigi Mangione is innocent, completely and fully. He has been convicted of no crime. He has had no fair trial. He is a SUSPECT. Luigi Mangione is entirely innocent and everyone needs to stop parroting this insidious propaganda that he “committed” the crime he is only SUSPECTED of. He is not a murderer. He is not a criminal. He is an innocent man.

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations