Timelapse fungus gifs

She’s like Sonic

*kisses you up and down your arm like I'm eating corn on the cob*

It's often said that Carmilla influenced Dracula, but usually it's left at that.

Hopefully I'll expand on this soon, but one of the Carmilla influences on Dracula can be found in Lucy Westenra:

Lucy has similarities with Laura as well, in that both of them are also the same age, from an old, known family, in peril of turning into a vampire, and are being kept in ignorance by parental/male figures. The narratives have differing attitudes towards the latter point.

A Cruel Love

A follow up to this previous Mircalla comic

You might be frustrated by the library never having a complete manga collection on its shelves at any given time, but the 12 year old checking out 14 volumes of One Piece at once is vital to the library ecosystem. He's like the sea otter keeping the kelp forest from being devastated by an excess of sea urchins.

To those curious some other keystone library species include:

—the retirees who’ve read more murder mysteries than I’ve had hot meals

—the paperback romance girlies (gender neutral) who check out every single bodice ripper the second it hits the shelves

—the dads very slowly making their way through a ‘1001 movies to see before you die’ list

—the one-man criterion collection who checks out like, three movies per day and brings them back the next. (TV series are only a minor roadblock.)

—kids who like Minecraft

---The new parents checking out 47 picture books for their 7 month old baby who clearly has nothing going on in their head except the Wii Sports Resort theme song

Just in case

I’m actually going to reblog a thing just because this is really important.

As someone who has epilepsy and used to have several grand mal seizures a day, I’d also like to add that “offer help” can range anywhere from keeping the person calm to explaining to them where they are and what they were doing to even just telling them they should sit and rest for a while longer (lack or coordination is common, and it can be hard to walk straight or see clearly).

It’s okay for them to take up to a half hour to fully regain their bearings and sort out what they were doing prior to the seizure. Just answer any questions calmly and be there for support.

If they come around and you start to panic or shake them or ask them what the heck is wrong with them they are going to freak out and panic too.

I cannot stress it enough that this is bad.

If someone has a seizure and they come out of it, please. please stay calm. They are likely disoriented and confused, even if it’s only for a minute or two, and you don’t want them panicking on top of that because they can have another seizure as a result.

IMPORTANT

IMPORTANT because last year a kid in my class had a seizure, none of us even knew he was at risk for them either so just cause you don’t think you know anyone doesn’t mean you don’t 

stay safe

I have to stress how important it is to time a seizure. If it lasts more than a few minutes, call an ambulance.

DO NOT CALL THE POLICE. I’m dead fucking serious. I had a grand mal in public once and the POLICE were called and imagine coming out of the seizure, feeling like you got smacked in the head with a sack full of bricks, confused, dazed, in desperate need of some sugar to boost low blood pressure and some DIPSHIT has called the police and I was being threatened with being ‘drunk and disorderly’. It took a phone call to my doctors office to get them to back off. The police cannot properly deal with sick people. 

Offer help can be:

Why you shouldn’t put anything in someone’s mouth: they will choke. Yes, they may bite their tongue but I can assure you it’s less traumatic than cracking your jaw on someone’s greasy wallet or choking on a spoon.

DO NOT HOLD ANYONE DOWN. Example: someone pinned my right shoulder mid-seizure a few years back and how I have a permanently displaced and clicking shoulder. Let the person flail around, those muscles are out of control and restraining them does cause more damage to the patient and you.

do people have no shame anymore?

LISTEN. Do I like this?? NO, absolutely not, fuck the planet burning automatic plagiarism machine!

BUT! Look at me. LOOK AT ME!

It is VITAL that we do not flame in the tag. Do you know what will happen then?? PEOPLE WILL STOP TAGGING FOR GENERATIVE AI!!!

If you want to preserve your ability to filter a lot of this nonsense out? WALK AWAY. Rant on here, rant to your friends, rant in Discord, but DO NOT make asshole comments on these works!!!

Yeah. If they stop tagging their work for this, your blocking of the tag won't keep them out of your searches. In fact, don't give stories with this tag engagement of any kind. Don't give them hits. Don't give them comments. Leave them to rot in the field with nothing to suggest to other readers that they contain anything worth seeing.

Also: AO3 is an archive. Of fanworks that were created. Do we like how they were created? No. But they were created. There's plenty of stuff on AO3 that we don't like. Remember Don't Like Don't Read? This counts too. This is why we have filters and back buttons.

^

#OH FUCK THISSSSS UGHHHHH#muse reblogs#don't like don't read doesn't apply to plagiarism you fucking morons#but if i see your shit is ai-generated i'm not only blocking you on ao3#but on every platform you exist on#because i know you have no fucking scruples or creativity in you#and i don't want you anywhere NEAR my works#which i painstakingly write without the use of a plagiarizing machine algorithm

@onwinedarkseas point missed re: the meaning of an archive. Archiving the historical moment When Kids Were Using The Plagerism Machine, And This Is What It Made has value. Blocking and filtering and such is fine. Removing your own works from an archive if you don't want them archived there is fine. But invective at the people who are pointing out the value of a wholly uncensored archive is not cool.

Feel free to block people who use AI at AO3. Block them everywhere you can find them, if you want.

If you flame them publicly - they won't stop using AI. They'll just stop telling people about it.

As long as they're tagging for it, you can avoid the stuff. If they stop tagging, then you wind up with AI results mixed in your normal searches.

Eventually, they will stop making AI-generated fanworks. Either they'll want to write things outside the scope of AI, or they'll get bored with the lack of praise, or they'll stop only when the AI tech bubble collapses. Either way, it's a temporary thing. Document it while it's going on and ignore it until it's not around anymore.

Mosquitoes actually are not replaceable in any ecosystem that naturally has them and that includes replacing them with any of the non biting species because these are the traits that make them so core to food webs:

All these things combined allow thst ecosystem to make huge volumes of insects from conditions barren to most other macroscopic life. You might think there are other insects that seem to make huge massive swarms out of nothing but there's really nothing that hits all the same qualities *except other insects that also suck blood.*

It's the precise combo of being able to "prey" on things millions of times larger and breed in nothing but a few drops of filthy rainwater or the moisture in a rotten log. That's the most efficient combination for anything that size to multiply that rapidly where nothing else can even survive, except of course the things that can move in because they eat them :)

A lot of people ask "could they just not be itchy though?" and I regret to inform that isn't actually their doing, there's no evolutionary advantage to making you itchy. That's your own body detecting the intrusion of another creature's saliva into your skin, where it doesn't belong, and reacting with histamines.

If you've ever been bit hard enough by a cat, dog or even human you may notice a similar effect!

I remember having a conversation with someone about my hummingbird banding volunteering and how the data went toward support for conservation efforts among other things.

They were all for that, and loved hummingbirds and supported it!

And made a quip about how the only thing they wanted to see extinct were mosquitoes and small biting insects/fruit flies.

40 to 60% of a hummingbird’s diet, and their main source of other nutrients, is small, soft bodied insects.

Including mosquitoes and fruit flies.

They had a massive struggle not wanting to accept that no fruit flies and mosquitoes = no hummingbirds.

Bluebirds also eat tons of mosquitoes!

I've also added this on other big threads about this topic but I should add it here: Being INCREDIBLY OBNOXIOUS to larger animals, even when they aren't spreading any pathogens (and again, most mosquitoes don't!) actually is another vital purpose. Ecosystems need biting and stinging things to keep big, stompy, hungry beasts from getting too cozy. Mammals are the most resource-hogging animals in almost any biome but parasites can inhibit their growth a little (a good thing), discourage them from spending as much time in the same area or ward them away from whole areas to begin with. Mosquitoes in particular breed in filthy, stagnant bacteria-rich water. You know what leaves behind conditions like that? ANIMALS! Animals eating all the plants, wallowing in the mud and shitting everywhere! A herd of ungulates can turn a lush and healthy marsh into just a cesspit if nothing stops them. But it's mosquitoes that find a cesspit an appealing nursery. And then you get a cloud of mosquitoes so dense that the ungulates move on! There used to be a great BBC documentary that actually showed "mosquito season" driving a mass migration of African megafauna but the shittified search engines right now are only showing me articles about mosquito control no matter how I try to find this again, gee thanks, maybe someone else can find it? So while the "mosquitoes are bad" all the big animals leave for months. Months of the plants growing back, months of the water clearing up until it's drinkable again (and the mosquito larvae themselves are filter feeders!), months of the mosquitoes becoming food for tiny birds and lizards and arachnids and amphibians, and the beautiful wetland is back again strong enough to survive the repeat of that cycle the next year. Everything you hate in nature - the ticks, the territorial wasps, the stinging plants - are pretty much nature's immune system. Obviously this doesn't mean the big mammals are "bad" either. The cycles of destruction are themselves also something ecosystems come to rely on as a regulatory force :)

The happiest of birthdays in the afterlife to the excellent Toshiro Mifune!