many lives →

my personal pick for most underrated animal is the european legless lizard, which i think is often taken to just look like a normal and rather plain snake, but if you're familiar with reptile anatomy at all it looks more like some sort of bizarre heraldic fantasy creature than basically anything else on earth

it's called the lateral groove and is literally a sort of seam in it's body that's always present:

I /think/ what's going on is that these evolved from something like alligator lizards, which have very rigid, slippery underbellies next to soft, stretchy skin on their sides (where their legs are situated), but now that they've evolved to be a "snake" and don't have legs that need to move around, that soft skin has decreased and turned into a weird little seam so they can slither easier and don't have a big weak point in their sides. it's compensation to have nice smooth scales all over like a snake would, imperfectly using the lizard anatomy they're working with

basically it's the leg removal surgery scar evolution dealt them

The Temple of Apollo in Pompeii by Johannes Wilhjelm (1894)

I vote that your writing continues to be:

You're allowed to have your own voice. You're allowed to write something only you want to read. Seize the freedom you were never given in your 8th grade English class!

'The machines we have now are not conscious', Lunch with the FT, Ted Chiang, by Madhumita Murgia, 3 June/4 June 2023

https://www.ft.com/content/c1f6d948-3dde-405f-924c-09cc0dcf8c84

It’s the same principles at work behind spam filtering and autocorrect, which is Bayesian statistical analysis.

I am re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness and unfortunately, my brain is too rotten for this, because all I can think about is an alternate timeline where the girlies got absolutely sauced on this book and instead of inventing the Omegaverse, people just wrote Kemmering AUs instead.

to be clear, Ursula K. LeGuin would hate this

if you're not into 70's feminist sci-fi, it goes like this:

on the planet Gethen, everyone is both biologically and socially androgynous for 21-22 days out of a 26 day cycle. on those other days, you go into kemmer. If you go into kemmer by yourself, nothing really happens except you go horny-nuts. however! if you're with someone else who is in kemmer, one of you will become male and one of your will become female, and you spend the rest of the time fucking respectfully, because this is an Ursula K. LeGuin book. There is no real rhyme or reason to which gender you become--it can vary from kemmer to kemmer. If you get pregnant, you stay female through the pregnancy and nursing; otherwise you go back to being gender-neutral for the rest of the month. You can get married (vow kemmer) and always do this with the same person, but there are canonically also fuck hotels where you go have orgies with whoever else is hot to go, if that's what you're into. lineage is traced down through babies that came out of your own body.

i cannot emphasize enough that all of this is written in the absolute least horny way possible.

i know this would never take off because (1) who is top and who is bottom is transient and (2) you can't use it to reinvent toxic heterosexuality for gay people

You have to mention that the protagonist of the book is a guy from earth that get sent there as a diplomat, and how the fact that earthlings presenting a gender all the time is considered hyper-perverted by the Gethenians, like if someone was going around town not only naked, but also poking everyone with his boner.

Atlas and the Hesperides by John Singer Sargent (1921)

A tea "gangster"

This is the gongfu method of brewing tea (功夫茶藝):

hope this explains it

it does and I hate it, thank you

important update

thinking abt how fucked up steam engine boiler explosions can look. theyre just pipes under there

gives me the idea of a ghost/monster engine that looks normal, albeit a bit battered, only to swing their smokebox door open and a myriad of pipes come bursting out like fucked up tentacles

Extreme zoomies

2020

bugs is…. shrimp????

A puppy is one who upholds and maintains heavenly principle. A puppy is a noble and honorable being, incorruptible to the whims of evil. A puppy knows bravery, honesty, is of sharp mind, and conducts themself with the proper intent and sense any puppy should. Though a puppy may be led astray from their sacred path, a lost puppy will always know the way to return by following their heart. This is puppies.