White-breasted Waterhen (Amaurornis phoenicurus), chick, family Rallidae, order Gruiformes, Singapore

photograph by Bala Siva

Singapore - photograph by JJ Harrison 

I just think he’s neat ✨

China's recently commissioned deep-ocean drilling vessel, Meng Xiang, has begun operations in previously unexplored regions, drilling to depths of up to 11,000 meters (36,000 feet) beneath the seafloor. Its mission is to penetrate the Earth's crust and reach the mantle.

Dramatic lightning storm over Death Valley National Park, California

More about me & prints: https://linktr.ee/steven.sandner

Aperture: f/8 (for sharpness and depth of field across the landscape) Shutter Speed: 2s (to capture the lightning strike with a long exposure) ISO: 200 (to maintain clarity in the low-light storm conditions)

UM GUYS. I JUST NOTICED A CRAZY ISSUE W THE TUMBLR UPDATE.

YOU CAN SEE THE ICONS OF ANONS SOMETIMES.

The way I was able to recognize several anons in one of my inboxes bc of this error. Oh my god. Guys. This isn’t supposed to happen.

Weighing in to say:

YES, I SEE THIS ON MOBILE. HOWEVER I DO **NOT** THINK IT'S SHOWING THE ANON'S REAL IDENTITY.

The profile pictures I see next to anon asks are profile pictures that belong to other, non-anon asks in my ask box also. Some info

I think the bug is the inbox INCORRECTLY attributing anons to neighboring, logged-in asks.

Which is still a bad bug! Considering it makes it look like a long-time follower of mine sent me a spam ask.

And is worse if, say, one of these was anon hate.

But it's NOT the anon's real identity. It's a neighboring ask asker's identity

So if you have anon hate in your inbox that looks like it's attributed to your dear friend, who sends you lovely asks all the time, it was Not them.

CONFIRMED THE BUG IS INCORRECT ATTRIBUTION.

Thanks @thepatchycat for being a test subject. As you can see the icon being attributed to this ask is NOT the patchy cat

The pictured icon belongs to @watchingforcomets who sent me a nice ask about nail polish yesterday which I have not yet answered!

Jelly Doughnut; German Jam Donut, Berliner

well, i set up a blusky account, to have on the side, as it seems like many ppl are using it.

i think tumblr is best and everyone should be here, but i don't rule the world.

by Gianluca Grisenti

Zabulon skipper

Courtesy Allegra Marcell

Golden Coconut Noodle Soup

Solas has a very important message for you all.

EXTREMELY important.

anyway solas was a gentle spirit that got whacked with the hardened mechanic, but the people of the inquisition did their level best to soften him without realizing it.

It's all because of the Veil

Why does Veilguard have less moral complexity than previous DA games? I think a significant part of the reason is that nearly all of the social issues introduced in previous games point toward taking the Veil down, or at least provide some reasons for taking that seriously as an option, and thus any discussion of them had to be suppressed.

Now obviously taking the Veil down wouldn't fix all of these things completely, and of course the exact moral calculus would depend sensitively on exactly how much damage taking the Veil down would actually cause; the game offers only very vague assertions from unreliable sources on this point, so there's no way to actually determine whether it would be a net positive.

But nonetheless all of these issues naturally provide arguments in favour of taking the Veil down. And it sure is striking to note the possibility that this single thing could address so many problems in one fell swoop!

Thus, since it was decided that the Veil wasn't coming down, the game couldn't really talk about any of these issues, since otherwise people might agree too much with Solas. The only exception is the evil magisters, but that is presented as a problem of some bad people who have to be killed, rather than interrogating the root causes in terms of the inherent inequality of a society in which a small proportion of people have all the magical power - a topic that can't be touched because, again, it leads to an argument for taking down the Veil.

And the problem is that the topics above cover almost all of the big social issues previously shown to us in Thedas. The only major thing left is issues relating to dwarven society, but since there is no dwarf faction there's no possibility of exploring that. Or perhaps there could have been a more in-depth exploration of the Titans - but any serious conversation about that would need to touch on elves and hence on elven oppression and would therefore still lead back to the Veil.

Honestly I sympathize with the writers here, because I suspect that the overarching decision to leave the Veil up and suppress any discussion of issues relevant to it was not theirs, so they were working within quite rigid constraints that weren't their fault. I personally think there is some really good writing and particularly great character work in the game, but it ends up feeling shallow because the topics above are barely touched and thus almost all of the moral nuance of previous games had to be dropped.

Satanic Leaf-tailed Gecko (Uroplatus phantasticus), family Gekkonidae, found in eastern Madagascar

photograph by Artur Tomaszek