when you go to bed significantly earlier than usual, a little menu should pop up asking if you want Wake Up Early or More Sleep. and then you should get what you requested. that's my human body UI improvement for the day.

don’t worry. it’s easier to love you than you think

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 :)

Honestly not being a killjoy, but do we have photos on what the protests were like in Republican territory? That seems more significant than the numbers in liberal zones like DC/NYC/Boston/Portland/Philly/etc.

This is a photo from the protest I attended at the KS Capitol building in Topeka as well as estimates from a local group as to the size of protests around the state.

Kansans were OUT

*whispers* behold. a goddess w/ deadly accuracy.

I cannot stop re-watching this

a lot of loving and being loved by people is recognizing when they're sincerely trying to help or comfort you even if their words are clunky and unhelpful at best and holding onto the sentiment that they are trying to reach for you at all. and a lot of the time that has to be enough because it's all you're going to get

Putting all tabletop players into a college level ethics class and forcing them to turn in a paper on moral philosophy before buying a new book

This is…. An interesting thing to say… on this post in particular….

I think a lot of people reblogging this from @probablybadrpgideas are interpreting this as “this would be such a funny wacky way to make the table soooo complicated” but I mean this as a complaint about the way that so many tabletop players seem to just. completely lack an understanding of ethics. what it actually means to behave ethically and treat others ethically. and i dont mean this as "why do people want to be mean and play as villains? :(" i mean "why are there so many tabletop players that sympathize with outright fascist factions to the point of wondering why theyre listed as 'Lawful Evil' in the book"

can you talk me through why this was a particularly bad or challenging thing for your party to have done

Goblins were in fact, for me, a turning point on this concept. I had a player who wanted to be a goblin, and I forgot about this fact up to the point that the party got a quest to kill goblins. As soon as I was announcing the quest I realized it would be a problem, though I didn't have anything else ready so I went with it. And it was! The players immediately questioned why the mayor was paying mercenaries to kill goblins, and then further questioned his justifications, at which point I realized it would be a better story if the goblins were a scapegoat and not an actual villain. This turned into a terse interrogation where the mayor threatened to put them in jail once their questions got pointed enough that he would have to either field accusations or lie; they then went CSI on the situation and drilled through his political cabinet to get answers. I had to improv pretty much all of it and I don't remember the actual ending (I know they sided with the goblins and the mayor was guilty), but this helped me realize that the Gary Gygax writing style of "certain races are just BAD and that's why they hang out in dungeons" was very short-sighted.

D&D writing, by and large, encourages a lack of questions. The surface runs deep. "Go into a cave and chop up goblins." Why are we doing this? "Goblins are bad." All goblins? "Yes."

I think the question of "why are there players comfortable siding with fascist factions and wondering why they're called 'lawful evil'" is pretty easily answered with... because D&D itself is inherently kind of fascist. And it's the most insidious kind of fascist, too- its villains are fascists, so how could you point fingers at the book?

Fire Giants are dwarf slavers. Drow are a megalomaniacal theocracy who hate men. Orcs are violent tribes of marauding killers. Illithids want to destroy all life and keep an entire civilization to scrub their floors. But these narratives still push the idea that "evil" is a racial trait. The players are not only justified in their campaign to destroy these cultures, they're encouraged to do it.

They let the cat out of the bag by making these playable races; because now, they're not cut-and-dry villanous societies. They're people. There are Drow accountants whose lives are about balancing taxes, not worshipping Lolth. There are Yuan-Ti who don't sacrifice babies on altars, and much prefer playing the lute or sewing blankets. Yet we're still expected to read "Chaotic Evil" under the Monster Manual entry for a bugbear and take it seriously.

Reblogging again to add a quick take: as a DM introducing ethics makes your game so much better.

I had an intro to my campaign that involved a mad scientist kidnapping someone and turning them into a wererat. I didn't think much of it and I spent way more time fleshing out the other NPCs, I just wanted to use that wererat as a boss fight.

Once the party encountered him though they immediately saw what I totally missed: the guy who became the wererat was absolutely the victim of this story. I did my best at thinking on my feet and made the wererat this defeated guy who only followed the mad scientist because he felt like his life was ruined. So they, through good rolls, convinced him to help them fight the mad scientist and it made for such a better story.

The moral I'm trying to convey is that you need to treat every NPC in your game as a world within themselves. And I mean EVERY NPC. Why are the wolves attacking people? Are they desperately hungry? Mind controlled? Territorial due to poachers? Why are the goblins working for the wizard? Extortion? Promise of riches? If the bandits see that everyone is in armor, why wouldn't they just let the party pass and wait for easier prey? If one of the bandits die, why wouldn't the rest of them run for the hills?

here’s a couple of articles on the history of racism + xenophobia in tolkien & how that influenced dnd

anyone interested in the subject should definitely also check out the whole Three Black Halflings podcast, which talks about being black in nerdy spaces. a lot of times they’ll have on guests talking about their intersections and experiences in nerdy spaces. they have an episode with the author of the articles above.

they’ve also played a ttrpg based on african mythologies rather than mostly european ones like most mainstream fantasy.

highly recommend!!

[Image descriptions:

2. Tumblr tags from "grad-school-fool" that read: "do you know how hard it is to DM a party with MORALS"; "their first dungeon they unionized the goblins"; "because thats what happens when you treat sentient species as sentient". /End ID]

it’s okay if you thought you’d moved on but still get triggered by something

into great silence

god I could be so wealthy if I had no ethics. that's so fucking frustrating. I'm living paycheck to paycheck because I'm not grifting vulnerable idiots on TikTok. I feel like I have the ability to very easily scam people. I could make a killing with AI. but god. I have morals and ethics and so I get to be poor as shit. I hate this fucking world

I could have made a killing as a psychic, but noooo I have to feel bad about lying to people ugh

I think abt this all the time because the thing is, evil rich people truly believe that they’re geniuses who have discovered a way to make money that the rest of us dummies haven’t…but the truth is that they are just willing to do evil shit that everyone else would prefer to not to because we have standards

When I attended my graduate school job fair, Raytheon (unprompted, hearing me say my degree at the next table) offered me $230,000/yr to come work for them. That was their opening offer after hearing nothing more than my degree, in a city with a very low cost of living. The only catch was that the job was working on vision systems for missiles. (i.e. those 'targeted' missiles which kill a ton of civilians as collateral or intentional damage)

I ended up taking an $85,000/yr job as an optical research scientist at Corning instead.

It is an odd feeling, having a price put on your soul. I'd be a millionaire with a house by my mid-30s if I'd accepted that. And the offer is still open, in fact I'd have an even more generous one waiting for me with the skills I have now.

In all seriousness, if you have the right skillset, you can actually sell your soul. This very week. You will live in comfort and moderate luxury for all your days. Two of my family members did that work decades ago, until they couldn't stomach it any longer, and it set up the rest of their lives.

But I promise you, it's not worth it. It's been almost 50 years for one of them and it still haunts him. He says the worst part was the way they (him included) talked about human lives as things. Numbers on a spreadsheet, sterile corporate jargon in meetings. A lifetime later and you can still see it in his eyes when he talks about it.

You can't take it back, treating humans like things.

despite the fear and dread we will persist.

Facts about your body after you turn 25, AKA things I wish someone had told me:

today's warm up: Some of my friends could do with this guy, maybe you might too. He has your favourite tea ready for you ☕