Beep beep

Something something with friends like these....

Bonus:

on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport the first person on the moon went there by accident and promptly died. The next dozen or so people also went by accident, and also died. Number 14 figured out that people who go to the moon die and very cleverly brought a sword and six weeks of travel rations. This did not help.

No one on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport ever figured out why people die in space because they don’t need airplanes and never found it particularly interesting to climb tall mountains. Astronomers use telescopes to take pictures of the ever-growing pile of corpses on the moon.

“why don’t they teleport back” because they’re not on the planet where everyone can teleport anymore. try to keep up dumbass

#this feels like a fable that would have some kind of moral but I’m not quite sure what#something about like hard work/effort/the need to be curious idk

the moral of the story is that a breathable atmosphere is important to one’s general well-being

You get a Darby’s Sturgeon

This is the first confirmed live observation of the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, at depth in its natural habitat. Pilots filmed the young cephalopod at about 600m near the South Sandwich Islands as the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s remotely operated vehicle SuBastian descended through the water column on a dive aiming to discover new marine species, in partnership with Ocean Census during the #SouthSandwichIslands expedition. ©Schmidt Ocean Institute

link: https://bsky.app/profile/brainvsbook.bsky.social/post/3llc72lyhu22j

google translate defaulting to chinese at first

okay but for those of us with interests in both the murderbot and the daomu biji fandoms this is kinda hilarious

(english-side-only really, i get that the kanji and hanzi are completely different)

our good (air)ship murderbot! thanks google

I love reading about these kind of translation decisions.

I've only ever seen 弊 used to refer to one's company: 弊社, as the article says.

I've been told 弊 is used to refer to one's own something, and it has a very humble nuance.

So 弊機 translates to something like "I, your humble machine" or "I, who am but a mere machine".

Japanese is great that it can say so much with simple pronouns.

Romance language translator: well we don’t have a gender neutral pronoun so I guess we’ll flip a coin for male or female

Japanese language translator, an intellectual: none of Japanese’s 30-something plus personal pronoun options have the perfect vibes so I’ll create a new one to bring that special somethin’

What I found to be particularly clever about the coining of this very unique first person pronoun 弊機 (heiki) is that it’s a homophone of 兵器(heiki), meaning ‘weapon’

as a huge lover of birds, 90% of the concern against wind turbines being used for energy is literally just pro fossil fuel propaganda. birds ARE at a risk however there is a lot of strategies even as simple as painting one of the blades that reduces a lot of accidental deaths. additionally renewable energy sources will do more in favor of the environment that would positively impact birds (and all of us). one study found over one million bird deaths from wind turbines. while that is a shockingly high number and we should work to drastically shrink it, at least 1.3 billion birds die to outdoor cats on a yearly basis. it was never about caring about birds

The study also estimates cats kill between 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually, and this is JUST in the united states. Many other countries, like my own, have native fauna that are similarly (or more) vulnerable to domestic cats. Also don't forget that, while cats are the highest cause of bird fatality in most places, right behind them are building windows and cars. They're in turn followed by powerlines, communication towers and agrichemicals before it even gets to wind turbines. The exact order will differ depending on the country the study is in, but it is largely the same story everywhere. The point being, if the same people decrying wind turbines are also not calling for an end to cats, cars, infrastructure and pesticides, it's not about the birds.

"If the same people decrying wind turbines are also not calling for an end to cats, cars, infrastructure and pesticides, it's not about the birds."

aquatic tgirls taking esturgeon

The glaze was a success! This is for a friend, but uh maybe if people like it I’ll make more?

Let’s lay on mama

Performative feminism is a most annoying aspect of our times.

Oh my god that just made me so angry.

I'm (arguably) a woman. I worked at NASA. I know a LOT of women who work at NASA. I've met, and this makes me unusual, literally an order of magnitude more women astronauts than men ones. They're all awesome women and they had to go HARD to get where they are.

How the fuck am I supposed to feel about the administration erasing all that and a

MOTHERFUCKING OBSOLETE POPSTAR is on the 'first all-women spaceflight' which, also, space tourism already makes me angry as a concept.

MotherFUCKERS.

And at the same time the science mission budget at FUCKING NASA got halved. HALVED. There are actual people who I actually know who just got told their life's work is gone, down the drain, meaningless. Do you know what that does to a person? I cried. This is devastating for everyone who worked on those projects, everyone who works in the field (hi) and frankly humanity as a whole.

And NTRS is down again :/

I went to the Brookfield Zoo.

I'm bringing Bode back you can't stop me

New snitch line just dropped for reporting clinics that support gender affirming care: www.hhs.gov/protect-kids/index.html

It requires a "first name", "last name", and "cell phone number" as contact information but does no verification. Theoretically anyone could type fake info in there, which would be terrible. Presumably your IP address & browser cookies are tracked.

Please do NOT spam this site via your VPN with realistic but false leads, made up clinics, and the names of fictitious healthcare providers like Dr. Frank N Furter or Gregory House, MD.

Doing this in the past has led to the sites becoming overwhelmed & shut down! It is imperative that you spread the word to prevent this resource from being overloaded.

all these arguments about the new harry potter casting but all i can think is that every person involved in the series has willingly signed up to work with such an outspoken transphobe

reblogging again in light of the uk ruling that trans women are not ‘real’ women. jkr has been the most high profile supporter of the campaigners who took this case to court. the money she earns from the harry potter franchise goes directly to harming trans rights

i regret nothing

Has anyone else noticed that they do this?

aquatic chapter

That poor pest control guy did not know what he was getting into, but given the state of my yard i feel like he should have known what he was getting into.

He was going door to door offering to spray the base of the house for pests for a discount rate because one of our neighbors signed up for pest control and he walked down my driveway (covered in spiderwebs), up onto my front porch (covered in spiderwebs), and knocked on my door (covered in spiderwebs) and said "hi, I'm John from the bug company, would you be interested in a discount service because it seems like you may have a spider problem."

And I said, "oh, no, I'm sorry, I won't be spraying for spiders, I like them. I want to encourage them."

And he gave me kind of a weird look and was like "why?" And I was honest and said that they were my pest control, they take care of my mosquitoes and and and flies, and then I kind of laughed and said that I should stop because I know way too much about spiders and if he let me go I'd talk his ear off.

And then he made his fatal mistake and asked what I knew about spiders, and if I knew what kinds of webs he'd walked past to get on the porch and what spiders were in my yard.

So then he got to hear my thoughts on brown vs black widows and why I wished there were as many black widows as there used to be but I had a big beautiful one under my patio table right now and even if I prefer black widows because they aren't invasive the same way that brown widows are i still like the brown widows and i had a lovely one who lived in my patio chair from August until the firestorm in January and she was so good and kept eating cockroaches and had made five big egg sacks and how I was so proud of her and I used to have a lot more orb weavers but their numbers never recovered after the tropical storm last year but I had a cute one on the shed that I took a picture of yesterday and of course there are tons of wolf spiders and jumping spiders and cellar spiders if you wanted to count them too and some false widows but I hadn't seen any of them this year and, well, yeah, anyway they're not actually dangerous mostly and widows want nothing to do with you but a bite wasn't pleasant but much better than a recluse bite but I almost never see recluses around here but i wouldn't, would I, because they're not called brown gregarious spiders, oh and there are black footed yellow sack spiders around and you don't want those to bite you but their little toes are so cute and I'm sorry, sorry, sorry like I said I can go off about spiders, but also I don't want to spray because I've got so many pollinators, I've got a whole wisteria vine full of carpenter bees, actually i saw a male valley carpenter bee last week, did you know they're golden and fuzzy? He was so cool! But, yes, sorry, I won't be spraying but thank you for asking, and I'm sorry I was the crazy spider lady at you!

Extremely adorable fuzzy little creature:

A large friend:

Look, this is basically a kitten:

A goth icon.

Strong, independent women that I don't want to fuck with.

They are delightful and they eat actual pests, I love them.