I might be a little biased but I’m honestly starting to believe that there’s no purer form of love than the defensive spite you see from biologists that have devoted their life to the study of a maligned or misunderstood species. For example:
The hyena biologist that arranged for Disney animators to come sketch captive hyenas for The Lion King film (Laurence Frank) was so incensed when the animals were depicted as villains in the movie that he later included boycotting the film on a list of ways the average person could help hyena conservation.
Though it’s commonly known that Charles Darwin’s distaste for parasitic wasps played a role in his development of evolution theory (since he felt no loving God would create animals with such a disturbing life cycle), the biologists who study these wasps find it an unfair characterization. When they were tasked with coming up with a common name for the family of parasitic wasps (Ichneumonidae) that old Charles so disliked, they proposed the name “Darwin Wasps” to spite the famous naturalist who had insulted their beloved family of insects.
Parasitologist Tommy Leung was so frustrated with the way people write about parasites to evoke horror and gore that he started writing a Parasite of the Day blog, that specifically avoids inflammatory or unsettling language to describe them. He also illustrates different species in colorful anime art on Twitter in a series called Parasite Monster Girls—which he calls his “love letter to parasites.”
I guess I’m just saying that if you’re a biologist studying an unpopular species and you have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder about it you can always count on me to be in your corner if you want to get a little petty with the public!
(ID: tags that read “when does a monster stop being a monster? when you love it”)
“Remember, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels 😇”
Lord help me I'm playing bg3 again
thank you Cathy your support means the world
Cathy you're scaring me
They just don’t release the hounds like they used to
in my day someone just let the dogs out. never did know who.
The (European) sun is a deadly laser, stay safe everyone
☝️🤓 it’s because the further you move toward the earth’s poles, the lower the angle of the sun is at the hottest parts of the day, meaning the radiation hits your whole body, causing it to feel 10-20 degrees warmer than the thermometer reading will tell you. People from tropical climes, aka close to the equator, are used to the sun’s radiation hitting a much smaller target- their head and shoulders.
Also the further you move toward the poles the more pronounced the difference between the length of day and night is. Worst part of a far-north (or south) heatwave is it doesn’t get dark long enough for meaningful cooling.
It’s not the heat. It very literally is the sun.
having free control over our endrocrine systems and the ability to change our genitals is currently inextricably tied to trans rights, and for good reason, but frankly i don't think it even needs to be. it should just be a matter of bodily autonomy, and that should be universal. if a cis dude wants tits and a pussy i think that would be fine. if cis women want a dick or nothing at all that should be allowed i think. people shouldn't need to be transgender to be allowed to change their bodies. free the nipple, enlarge the nipple, remove the nipple. whatever the fuck you want. i dont know if there's a term for this belief but i hold it very strongly. everybody biohack yourselves NOW
The different kinds of love and yearning.
Younger folk are getting really good at spotting AI slop, to the consternation of marketing execs.
Found on Mastodon.
From what I remember of back when Millennials were outpacing Boomers at internet and tech stuff in general, this is going to cause a lot of issues for companies angling to use slop in marketing because the younger set are always going to be better at spotting it than the older, but the older are going to be the ones approving marketing campaigns and ads and etc. Meaning, the older people will not ever be able to tell what might actually convince the younger.
The good news is that if it persists and Gen Z and Gen Alpha continue to scoff at the generated stuff, then marketing departments aiming at them will just have to give up on using it because they won't be able to figure out how to fool their targets with it.
The bad news is that this won't apply to scams and campaigns aimed at older people, so once again we're going to have a situation where the kids will be the ones lunging across the coffee table to stop Mom from giving her financial info to that really obvious fake scam mom oh my god do NOT buy that it isn't even a real thing.
Anyway godspeed to the younger generations.
Okay but what if they grew old(er) together (they're like mid 40's here, that's not old, but you know what I mean).
The unemployment rate got people inventing psychological warfare
Bc I can't stop chewing on the reason I wrote this post abt Grace having to deliver the taumoeba to Erid alone:
Imagine you're a technician at one of the space observatories on Erid. You're not sure why you're still working on documenting the little crackles and hums of space, Erid is dying anyway, but what else are you gonna do?
And then the sensors pick something garbled up. You tinker, find the right wavelength of long-distance radio transmission, and your claws go numb.
"...you...receive... question"
As soon as you frantically report this, everyone tries to keep it contained. But as the nature of eridians goes, a friend of a friend of a colleague calls Adrian. By the time they make it to the observatory, it's painfully clear that voice isn't Rocky, but you'd have to cleave Adrian open to stop them from being in that room.
So, there they are, a dozen high-ranking eridians, a surviving spouse, and a shaking technician. They press play. The message is eerie, some words rising, others falling, some cut a second before their natural conclusion. It is the voice of second engineer rocky, but something else is speaking through him, halting and unnatural, like a body possessed.
"please receive. Is captain of starship "project last hope". Name is Doctor Grace-Full from Sol-3. Already meet Erid Starship at Tau Ceti. Not able help. Apology. But have star-killer predator on starship. Grace-Full try help Erid. Repeat. Have star-killer predat-"
You could hear a dust mote in that room.