So, uh, one of our biggest suppliers is shutting down.

We found out yesterday that our main supplier for clothing - everything from our skater dresses and skirts with pockets to swimsuits and joggers - is going out of business before the end of the month, entirely due to the tariffs. They sell to the United States, pretty much, and once the de minimis (no tariffs under $800 in value) goes away, they're pretty much boned.

Yes, we're devastated. Yes, we'll be okay - we are already looking for alternatives, and we may have to change a few things, but, we'll make it work.

We will cease accepting orders for everything in our Free Domestic Shipping collection at 11:59 PM Pacific Time, April 15th, 2025. Until then, use code BYE15 for 15% off these items. This is well before their final cutoff for production - we're playing it safe.

(boy, we are so tired of manufactured crises)

Me, after hearing nothing back from Canadian pet stores to find Gremmi more of her beloved carrots, now including photos of her with her carrots and her carrot stall into my emails as guilt tax:

Please have this carrot photo emotionally guilt you into shipping me these toy carrots from your country. Please. Give me the carrots. Let this cat child have her beloved toys. Please. Let my journey to find these toys and a willing shipper and suffering end. Don’t make me start emailing the South African, Australian or UK shops. Pleas—

A STORE ACTUALLY RESPONDED. The emotional guilt photos worked. The downside is they only have 2 in stock, estimated $20 in shipping, and they even checked with their supplier who doesn’t have the carrots in their catalog anymore 🫠

The pet store owner when I said no one else had responded:

New carrots have ARRIVED and we are EXCITED

In-depth photos and creation of Carrot stall here :) and #a girl and her carrots to see how hard she loves these carrots

Also, to answer: I cannot sew to save my life lol. I have not made a pattern, and I wish I knew what it was about these carrots that she loves so much. She’s so particular; any other carrot toy we give her she turns her nose up at. Something about these one’s size, texture, smell- idk! She just loves them.

the original source seems to be gone but there's a memory for the link this pretty well known special cat from the internet was originally from a Thai facebook group, the second pic is really where it shines, just so flipping cute

actually it does feel good to block people for petty reasons

actually it

does feel good to block people

for petty reasons

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Why does like every language do things with their R sounds that nobody else understands

Discworld is an interesting beast in the age of ACAB. Like, the city watch books are a story about police and the way in which a good police force can help and protect people. Which would make it copoganda. And I'm not going to say that the City Watch books are completely free of copoganda, but they also do something interesting that fairly few stories about heroic police officers do, and I think it has a lot to do with Samuel Vimes. A lot of copoganda stories like, say, Brooklyn 99, are perfectly capable of portraying cops as cruel, bigoted, and greedy, but our central cast of characters are portrayed as good people who want to help their communities. The result is that the bad cops are portrayed as an aberration, while most cops can be assumed to be good people doing a tough job because they want to help protect people from the nebulous evil forces of "Crime". The police are considered to be naturally heroic. Pratchett does something very interesting, which is provide us with Vimes' perspective, and present us with an Unnaturally heroic police force. In Ahnk-Morpork, the natural state of the watch is a gang with extra paperwork. It's the place for people who, at best, just want a steady paycheck and at worst want an excuse to hit people with a truncheon. Rather than be an army defending people from the forces of Crime, the Watch is described as a sort of sleight-of-hand, big burly watchmen in shiny uniforms don't stand around in-case a Crime happens in their vicinity, they stand around to remind people that The Law exists and has teeth. The Watchmen are people, when danger rears it's head, their instinct is to hide and get out of the way. When faced with authority, their instinct is to bow to it out of fear of what it might do to them if they don't. Carrot is a genuine Hero, but his natural heroism is presented as an aberration. Normal Cops don't act like Carrot does. The fact that the Watch ends up acting like a Heroic Police Force is largely due to the leadership of Sam Vimes, but Vimes himself is a microcosm of the Watch. The base state of Sam Vimes would be an alchoholic bully of an officer, one who beats people until they confess to anything because that makes his job easier. Vimes The Hero is a homunculous, an artificial being created by Sam Vimes fighting back all those instincts and FORCING himself to behave as his conscience dictates. Vimes doesn't take bribes or let his officers do the same because, damnit, that sort of thing shouldn't happen, even if doing so would make things a lot easier. Vimes doesn't run towards sounds of screaming because he WANTS to, he forces himself to do so because somebody needs to. It's best summed up in Thud “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Your Grace.” “I know that one,” said Vimes. “Who watches the watchmen? Me, Mr. Pessimal.” “Ah, but who watches you, Your Grace?” said the inspector with a brief little smile. “I do that, too. All the time,” said Vimes. “Believe me.”

In the hands of another writer, or another series, this exchange would be weirdly dismissive. To whom should the police be accountable to? Themselves, shut up and trust us. But from Vimes, it's a different story. Vimes DOES constantly watch himself, and he doesn't trust that bastard, he's known him his entire life. The Heroic Police are not a natural state, they're an ideal, and ahnk-morpork only gets anywhere close. Vimes is constantly struggling against his own instincts to take shortcuts, to let things slide, but he forces himself to live up to that ideal and the Watch follows his example. Discworld doesn't propose any solutions to the problems with policing in the real world. We don't have a Sam Vimes to run the NYPD and force them to behave. We don't have a Carrot Ironfounderson. But it's at least a story about detectives and police that I can read without feeling like I'm being sold propaganda about the Thin Blue Line.

bugs is…. shrimp????

Cliffs of Moher, Ireland (by Sarah Elizabeth)

Norbert is very happy about his sweater today.

serious answer: I ran some quick math (below the cut) and found out that this ant would impart about ten times the amount of energy as an impact by a 45kg Howitzer round, or one thousand times the energy yield of a typical handgrenade. Ordinarily I would expect something like an ant to disintegrate on impact at high speeds, but there is simply so much energy in that ant that it would have nowhere else to go but forward - even if it completely exploded on impact without penetrating, you would definitely die and definitely need a closed-casket funeral. If it simply went straight through without meaningful disintegration, carrying the majority of its energy away with it, with this being a hypersonic projectile (actually, it's a relativistic one) it still would definitely shred at least a grapefruit-sized hole in you just from cavitation damage. Given the ridiculous speed, it would also create a significant amount of heat and a concussive sonic shockwave as it did so, definitely killing you instantly and probably turning you into charred ground beef.

TLDR yes you would be super mega dead

oh but the ant so small I can take it

that's true I didn't think of that

Well, fuck me sideways. Connections have been made.

My girlfriend has this specific gesture she does sometimes, a very particular way of turning her wrist around and locking her fingers in one specific grip. Fast or slow, the angle of her wrist and the rhythm of the movement are always exactly the same, and at this point I've learned to recognize the motion well enough that she could do it with her back towards me and I know she's doing it.

The first time I saw her do it I thought she was putting something into her pocket, but once I noticed her making it more often I started making connections. I saw her doing it unconsciously when some situation in the house is getting tense - not during the casual sparring arguments with my other housemates, but the serious fights where shit is about to actually get fucking real - and I figured that it's a nervous thing, she doesn't like where this is going and it's scaring her. So that became my cue that it's time to back down.

I don't know when she noticed that I noticed her doing it. We've never talked about it, but at some point she started doing it on purpose, as her way of telling me that I should stop causing problems. Rotating her hand slowly means she's seeing a problem brewing and it's better that I watch myself before I start escalating it, and a quick flick and snap means whatever I was just about to say or do, I should cut that shit out right this fucking second. It works for some reason, so I've respected that.

My girlfriend does some volunteering favors for the neighbors here sometimes. Today she asked if I wanted to come along to walk this one old couple's dog, and I was feeling up for it so I went along. My father was terrified of dogs so I'm not familiar with them, but her family has always had them.

So we were walking, talking about something else, enjoying the nice weather for once, when my girlfriend saw another dog walker approaching. I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, but the other dog walker started pulling the dog back with this roller leash thing whatever the fuck they're called. And then the old couples' dog started growling.

With the familiarity of someone who's been handling dogs all her life my girlfriend grabbed the little fucker's leash, wrapping it around the width of her palm and gripping it to pull the dog closer a second before it could bolt to attack. A move she's probably done countless times in her life, that she could do in her sleep, by instinct, without ever even thinking about it. A gesture I've learned to fucking spot from across the room from the corner of my eye. That exact same fucking twirl and grip. I have no idea if she noticed me noticing it or making the connection.

She's fucking learned to pull my fucking leash back when I'm about to start shit.

Hey Science side of tumblr folks, if you were working on an NIH grant that was canceled, ProPublica is looking to hear from you to amplify your story and put it in the perspective of the ongoing assault on our commitment to care for each other.

Multiple relatives of mine donated their bodies to science. That donation was in each case an awe inspiring act of kindness and love, an effort to help create a world in which the thing that was at the time actively killing them would not do so to others if they could help it.

Huge swaths of disease research is based on similarly beautiful commitments to humanity, and the NIH represents our societal commitment to make those sacrifices matter.

So I am taking these bastards pulverizing it extremely personally and am incandescent about it. I am personally committed to making everyone involved in this suffer as much as I personally can. Which is to say I would appreciate if you took the time to help ProPublica shine a light on this atrocity if you have a story to tell them.

ProPublica is reputable af and extremely hardcore in their investigations. They've also got a pretty good track record of embarrassing politicians enough to get good shit done.

I support them financially because we NEED them, and I encourage anyone who fits the profile to get in touch with them.

WHAT

Image description: Screenshot of Bluesky post from Hank Green:

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

5 Calls has a new and improved short tariffs script up! Call your people. If you want my slightly longer voicemail-sized Republican-specific script, it’s in this post here.

I suggest also calling to oppose the SAVE Act, a voter suppression bill up this week (today is April 9). 5 Calls has a script for that, too.