I drew a quick little comics essay today about a topic near and dear to my heart: horror for kids!
Or, “why some kids like to read books that scare them, and why you should let them.”
“If my life wasn’t funny, it would just be true. And that is completely unacceptable.”
— Carrie Fisher ✨
I love her. I miss her.
i really relate to snakes…i too wanna eat several times my body weight & take a nap in the sun
And then take of your whole skin at once to reveal a new one and leave the old one behind?
see u get it
I too wish to unhinge my jaw and consume an egg whole
u get it a little less
I too wish my rear end could rattle when I shake it and scare off potential threats
ok now i’m back on board
I perform an entire 45 minute dance solo about the whole shedding your skin thing! (It may involve putting glue on my hands to peel off because I am sometimes 10, even though I am actually 45.)
Weird Questions
If I’m somewhere where there are Educational Personell (Museum Docents, Q&A zookeepers, Park Rangers, Public School Teachers, Professors etc.) I have a question I like to ask them:
“What’s the weirdest question someone’s ever asked you?”
I say weird and not Dumb becuase even buckwild questions can have important answers, but whoever I ask it too usually has to think about it for a bit, then comes out with something different every time. And I love every single answer becuase it just warms my heart out there to know people are trying to understand the world a bit better, no matter how limited thier starting point. A collection of favorites so far:
- Art Museum Host: “A man once asked me “Can you help me find someone and if you can’t can you find someone who can?” Which I always thought would be a great title for an Artwork.”
- Park Ranger: “I’m so glad the Japanese couple asked me “Is bear spray like mosquito spray and it goes on the jacket, or on the bear?” instead of just trying it.”
- Zookeeper: “A man once pointed at the live red-tailed hawk I had out for a demo and asked me “Aren’t those extinct?” We eventually figured out he meant “Endangered” but I hear that question every time I see a redtail now.”
- Primary School Teacher: “About every other year a student asks me what part of the school I sleep in at night, because clearly I live here. I tell them I sleep under the bleachers in the gym but it’s actually the Nurse’s office.”
- Professor: “A student asked me “So how do I use this in a conversation when my aunt is wine-drunk at thanksgiving and being a jerk again?” Which honestly is a fair question about philosophy and really changed how I teach rhetoric.”
- Natural History Docent: “A woman once asked me what the difference between a Million and a Billion was. Kinda pieced together that she’d just left her church for her safety, and was learning about Earth’s Natural History for the first time. Nobody else was there because it had been snowing, so I walked her through the Hall Of Time and answered as many questions as I could. She was bewildered, but really trying. It always struck me as a really brave thing, to try to understand all of that while fresh out of a dangerous situation. I hope it helped.”
- Forensic Scientist: “People ask me how to commit murder all the time, but if you really hate someone, stealing thier identity causes much more suffering and is a lot harder to get caught at. A guy did ask me if working at a body farm was creepy and did not like that it was ok until you learned that decayed human fingers are a deer’s favorite midwinter snack.”
- Zookeeper: “People call us becuase they think they’ve found an escaped animal all the time, or they think they’re neighbor’s husky is a wolf. One guy asked me if his dog was part hyena because it had spots. But that one guy really did have a Tiger in his toolshed that one time so we try to take them seriously.”
- Meteorologist: “A guy once emailed me about how hard you’d have to fan a tornado to make it start spinning in the other direction and included a picture of him holding up a box fan at an approaching tornado. We printed it out for the work fridge.”
- Park Ranger: “I was giving a talk on the Yellowstone Supervolcano and a guy asked if, after it errupted, the earth would be ‘hollowed out’. I suppose I was just relieved that he understand that the earth isn’t flat.”
- Primarcy Shcool teacher: “A student once asked me where she could sell her bones online so she could by a dog. Which? Same.”
- Natural History Docent: “A guy asked us ‘If I had a time machine, and managed to kill and cook a T-Rex, what would it have tasted like?’ and every paleontologist on staff deciced to take him seriously. They did research to learn about fat distribution, and read up on culinary science to learn what flavors meat, even did chemical analysis on the bones. They concluded that it’d be Tough (no evidence of juicy fat pockets), bitter (carnivores tend to taste foul) and would probably kill him, because heavy metals travel up the food chain and T-Rex accumulated a lot of the cadmium that was in the dirt in the late cretaceous. Wrote him a letter with our findings and he sent us back a drawing of him and his buddies cooking a T-Rex over a fire and all of them throwing up and dying, and it’s my favorite drawing in the whole world.”
Honestly, the first natural history docent one made me tear up a little...
spastasmagoria
I, your Friendly Neighborhood Librarian absolve you from all literary sins and encourage you to go and read what you like on the platform of your choosing.
Never feel guilty for reading fan fic at 3am. Everything is fanfic in the end. From fanfic you were made, to fanfic you shall return.
Read that which has been panned by literary snobs. Read novels churned out by the dozen by authors with a dozen pseudonyms.
Read your US and People. Flip through Popular Science just for the gadgets section. Read articles about the perfect chocolate chip cookie.
Read books outside your comfort zone. Don’t finish them if you don’t want. It’s the book’s fault, not yours.
Read in your comfort zone. Read a YA and romance and science if and fantasy.
Skip over the boring bits. Read it because you heard about it from Oprah or because everyone else is reading it.
Giggle yourself silly at something so poorly written and full of author wish fulfillment that you just can’t stop reading it.
Don’t listen to the keepers of taste and culture. Their reward comes every time they pat themselves on the back for their superior taste.
Don’t listen to the academics that bemoan the downfall of society and learning. They have been doing that since Socrates’ time.
Don’t listen to the tv presenters who insist you are not cultured if you haven’t read from this list of books.
Audio books count as reading. Ebooks count as reading. Fanfic of questionable quality counts as reading. Rereading books for the third time counts as reading. Reading to your child counts as reading. Reading from the back of the cereal box (and doing the puzzle) counts as reading.
TL;DR: read what you want. Don’t be ashamed. Never let someone try to make you feel bad for how or what you read and enjoy. Tell them that I, your Friendly Neighborhood Librarian have absolved you from your guilt and have given you special blessings. Go forth and read, my child.
i had to check if this is actually the actual Penguin Random House posting cat memes and yes it is
Holy shit. I made this post over on my former main blog and it’s still going around. Fantastic. And yes, you are absolved. And course I now see all the typos. It looks like I typed that thing on my phone or something.
Praying that $1500 randomly comes to you when you need it the most this year.
I got a check for $1697 a week after I reblogged this. The fuq.
worth a shot
what the hell.
canon: they died
fanfic: fUCK YOU
Canon: and so they never met
Fanfic: here’s a funny story
Canon: There was tension and pining, but they never even kissed.
Fanfic: Actually,
Canon: Torture the cinnamon roll.
Fanfic: Torture the cinnamon roll.
Canon: When they traveled they stayed in separate rooms
Fanfic: AND. THERE. WAS. ONLY. ONE. BED!!!!!
Canon: … and they were roommates.
Fanfic: oh my god, they were roommates…
Canon: They were international assassins who assassinated assassins.
Fanfic: But hot DAMN wait till you hear about this cafe they opened
Canon: They had a coffeeshop
Fanfic: but they were ASSASSINS
Canon: they were mortal enemies and attempted to murder each other on multiple occasions
Fanfic: bUT THEY GOT MARRIED AND ADOPTED CHILDREN
marvelmisha
Everytime I reblog this has a new addition and it’s the best
ladyyinburgundy
Canon: They were straight
Fanfic: Lol
This is why I will always love fanfic
My favorite thing is that Europe is spooky because it’s old and America is spooky because it’s big
“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner
A fave of mine was always the american tales where people freaked out because ‘someone died in this house’ and all the europeans would go ‘…Yes? That would be pretty much every house over 40 years old.’
‘…My school is older than your entire town.’
‘Sorry, you think *how far* is okay to travel for a shopping trip?’
*American looks up at the beams in a country pub* ‘Uh, this place has woodworm, isn’t that a bit unsafe?’ ‘Eh, the woodworm’s 400 years old, it’s holding those beams together.’
A few years ago when I was in college I did a summer program at Cambridge aimed specifically at Americans and Canadians, and my year it was all Americans and one Australian. We ended the program with a week in Wessex, and on the last day as we all piled onto the bus in Salisbury (or Bath? I can’t remember), the professors went to the front to warn us that we wouldn’t be making any stops unless absolutely necessary. We’re headed to Heathrow to drop off anyone flying off the same day, then back to Cambridge.
“All right, it’s going to be a long bus ride, so make sure you’re prepared for that.”
We all brace ourselves. A long bus ride? How long? We’re Americans; a long bus ride for us is a minimum of six hours with the double digits perfectly plausible. We can handle a twelve hour bus ride as long as we get a bathroom break.
The answer. “Two hours.”
Oh.
derinthemadscientist
English people trying to travel around Australia and wildly underestimating distance are my favourite thing
a tour guide in France told my school group that a particular cathedral wouldn’t interest us much because “it’s not very old; only from the early 1600s”
to which we had to respond that it was still older than the oldest surviving European-style buildings in our country
China is both old and big. I had some Chinese colleagues over; we were discussing whether they wanted to see the Vasa ship (hugely expensive war ship which sank on it’s maiden voyage after 12 min). They asked if it was old, I said “not THAT old” (bearing in mind they were Chinese) “it’s from the 1500s.” To my surprise they still looked impressed, nodding enthusiatically. Then I realised I’d forgotten something: “…I mean it’s from the 1500s AFTER the birth of Christ” and they went “oh, AFTER…”.
My dad’s favorite quote from various tours in Italy was “Pay no attention to the tower – it was a [scornful tone] tenth century addition.”
My last boss was Chinese, and she said when her parents came to visit her from Beijing they pronounced Chicago “A very nice village.”
Not to get political but my philosophy is fundamentally that all people should suffer less. That it’s everyone’s responsibility to try to make the world a little better for everyone else. And anyone trying to do the opposite is an asshole who needs to stop.
Not to get political but my philosophy is fundamentally that all people should suffer less. That it’s everyone’s responsibility to try to make the world a little better for everyone else. And anyone trying to do the opposite is an asshole who needs to stop.
Nobody wants to discuss that. “It’s the video games!” 😕 😠
It is actively traumatic living in this country.
It really is. I was just up in Canada for the last ten days, and I could absolutely feel a shift in my mental health because things like this were just so much less of a constant underlying worry.
Source: twitter.com
unit04-deactivated20160702
shpider-synthpop
Rob Zombie confirmed for coll fuckin’ guy
shpider-synthpop
ROB ZOMBIE CONFIRMED FOR COOLEST FUCKING GUY
i love that Rob Zombie is now Baby Metal’s badass protective grandpa
rhan-hastur
Are they actually trying to gatekeep metal from Rob fucking Zombie? Go cry some more, here’s Babymetal with Abbath.
sciencebranchblues
Rammstein accepted Babymetal as one of their own, that’s good enough for me.
Babymetal with Rob Halford
TBH I love me some Baby Metal and I need to listen to them again. Do recommend if you haven’t!
I love this.
Lani Ka'ahumanu, co-founder of BiPol (the first bisexual political organization), marches in the San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Freedom Day, June 24, 1984.
The history of bi activism is bad puns. It’s good to know we’re keeping up the tradition.
i want
to be able
to consume comedic content
without being constantly braced for a “joke"
in which people like me are the punchline.
why is this so hard for people to understand?
i know that there’s a big movement around making gardens animal-friendly and planting native plants. which is GREAT! but it can be a little overwhelming to get started. if you don’t know where to start, check out audubon’s native plant tool here. you just put in your zip code and it shows you native plants for your area, and you can sort by drought hardy, bird attractant, etc. it’s a great tool and it’s free!
Name one thing a wasp could do that a bee cant I'll wait
Honestly though I’m having trouble gauging the seriousness and tone of your question??? But just in case this is 100% serious, Wasps are awesome. I’m not an expert on wasps so I’m not really qualified to talk about them at length, but be aware that they serve an important ecological role.
People seem to hate wasps thanks to having or hearing about encounters with just a handful of species, but there are thousands upon thousands of wasp species around the world. Many don’t even sting! The word “wasp” applies to a large variety of hymenopterans, not just yellow jackets and paper wasps. Even those species that tend to sting people are important (and awesome). The variety if wasps in my back yard alone is pretty mind blowing. (I have a soft spot for mud daubers!)
And if you ask me theyre just really cool. I mean its not a competition, I love bees. But wasps are underrated. I think of them as like the raptors of insects. Awesome looking, badass, capable. The hate that wasps get is VASTLY overblown.
Like. I’m not saying you can’t be afraid of wasps. I’m not even saying you have to like them. But this wasp vs bees stuff is beyond unnecessary, it could actually be harmful. Theres a lot to appreciate about wasps! Try thinking of them as bees cool cousin!
People who know more about wasps than I do, feel free to weigh in! And no one be mean to the question asker!
Hi, yeah, wasp specialist here. Going just off of memory here but:
There’s two rules of thumb with wasps that i love, boiled down basically to
If theres a fig tree species, theres a wasp species as its sole pollinator,
and
If theres a spider species, there’s a wasp species specifically to provide predation for it.
Beyond that, heres a few more fun ones:
Parasitoid wasps keep many other insect populations in check even without explicit predation.
There are over 100,000 species of wasps (some estimates at around 160,000 iirc) so like. There’s Going to be a lot of unique ones out there that do things that bees outright can’t do.
Meanwhile, there are species of wasp (like the Mexican Honey Wasp) that produce honey, which isn’t unique to bees.
Additionally, just through predation and parasitoidism, they protect gardens and plants by keeping the population of plant-eating and other pest insects in check.
Basically, wasps are great & deserve so much better PR, meanwhile there are bee species like the Africanized bee apis mellifera that are more aggressive than a lot of wasp species, because, again, 160,000 species. The majority of hate for wasps comes from human anthropocentrism & lack of education on them, & they’re really incredible creatures.
zoologicallyobsessed
I’m a bee scientist and while I love bees, wasps are also incredibly important and your hatred of them doesn’t make them any less important. Especially when its based off like two species of paper wasp.
Can a bee reprogram the biochemistry of plant material to provide a safe nursery for its eggs and growing larvae? Because there are only thousands of species of wasps that do that. Typically without harming the trees in question. Which species of bees can do that again?
Above: Cynipidae sp. galls on oak leaves in Texas
July 7, 2019
jackthevulture
@gothwasps thank you for weighing in with your expertise!! point people not hating bees over africanized bees but hating wasps is my FAVORITE. It really demonstrates how ridiculous it is.
I once talked to someone who said she was in school to be an entomologist who said she hated wasps and that they were assholes. And no matter how many times I brought up non stinging wasps or their ecological importance I couldn’t get her mind off those 2 species of paper wasp that apparently “sting for no reason”.
Idk if Im just biased because I’ve NEVER BEEN STUNG despite being around paper wasps fairly often, but they sure as hell arent as aggressive as some people make them out to be otherwise I would have by now.
Also @nanonaturalist thats dope as hell.
Random short aside:
One time I was at an outreach event, talking to a lady. I see a bug flying toward me out of the corner of my eye, feel something maybe brush my ear for a fraction of a second, but it was gone by the time I’d tried to see what it had been.
The lady I was talking to told me a wasp (she said a yellow jacket, but could have easily been a paper wasp), flew up to me, climbed through my ear tunnel (my ears are stretched), and flew off.
I don’t remember which color I was wearing, but it must have been one of the bright ones 😂. Wish I could have gotten a picture of that!
July 7, 2019
@crispiest-bagel-in-the-west seriously. I’ve had paper wasp nests literally ABOVE MY FRONT DOOR for the past three years.
Here is where they put up this year’s nest! The door in the corner? Is the front door to my house!
Sometimes I drag out a ladder, climb up it, and get within a foot of it so I can take photos of the babies.
Look at the little babies in there!!! And you can see an egg in one of the cells, too! Isn’t that super interesting???
Why, hello there, ladies!
This one I took at night with my headlamp on, and I definitely climbed a ladder and got up in their faces for this one. Don’t they look so angry and ready to sting me? Also, check out the darkened cells on the right side of the nest, those are BIG FAT BABIES ready to get wrapped up for pupation. Chunky babs!!
In three years of having several paper wasp nests ABOVE MY FRONT DOOR, which I have GOTTEN UP VERY CLOSE TO to photograph, sometimes with a HEADLAMP, I have NEVER BEEN STUNG!
They WON’T STING YOU UNLESS THEY HAVE A REASON TO!!! I am fluent in insect. I get them. If you don’t get insects, then sure, steer clear of wasps. But keep in mind, the actions of your fear response look like threatening behaviors to wasps so they might come after you! Just leave them alone and realize they want absolutely nothing to do with you!
July 7, 2019
I have been stung by paper wasps once when I unknowingly put my hand RIGHT where they were building their nest. (It was on the handle of our garbage cart, so we did have to knock that one down.) In general, if they are building somewhere that doesn’t interfere with day to day activities like taking the garbage out, we leave em be and the ones around our house seem pretty chill most of the time.
You aren’t a failure because you’re unwell again. Sh*t. Happens. It just so happens that sometimes the sh*t is our brains. This storm will pass. I promise. And there are lots of us out here fighting against it right alongside you. Besides me (hi), I recently found this video to be very validating and helpful. °˖✧*• Shop, Patreon, Book, Mailing List *•. ✧˖°`
Reblog to have a giant octopus friend reassure you when you’re having a bad time
This is some learned helplessness shit. Don’t put up with it. (Also, by the time we were married my husband could get sent to the store for tampons and come home with the right brand and size. What the hell sorta shit is that?)
Although, to be fair I could see him bringing home something like that and handing it to me as a joke. But he would also have gotten the correct item.