@aconfusedbird / aconfusedbird.tumblr.com
Completely redid my Mr Stones design because I’ve since figured out how I want to draw curators, and I couldn’t get the idea of ghost-faced bat Stones out of my head, it’s both ridiculous and terrifying <3
I was going to keep the old colours but I tried this kind of slate-y colour and it worked better. It was tricky to fit the cloak on over that strange head shape and mass of fluff, but I did manage to make it more ornate than the last version
Finland, when a new store opens:
Murderbot showing up in Exit Strategy like “whats up ive been on a journey of self discovery and i’m back. you’re doing everything wrong btw” is SO funny from PresAux’s perspective
Every Murderbot book except Fugitive Telemetry is a deus ex machina story except it’s from the perspective of the deus ex machina
Machina est deus, if you will
Mom sent me a facebook link to a PBS news hour post about how the anti-lawn movement is growing. The vast majority of the comments on it were stuff like this:
Most people are on our side here, even the so-called "boomers." We just have to be spreading ecological knowledge and practical means of creating useful habitat in back yards! Educate! Protect! Resist!
The fact that Mark Cuban can do this is just further proof of how much capatalism is f*cking people over.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban launched an online pharmacy Thursday that offers more than 100 generic drugs at an affordable price with a goal of being “radically transparent” in its price negotiations with drug companies.
For example, the leukemia drug imatinib is priced at $47 a month on MCCPDC compared to the $9,657 retail price.
The online pharmacy’s prices for generics factor in a 15% margin on top of actual manufacturer prices and a $3 pharmacist fee, the statement said.
yes this is pretty unbelievable right now—but just look at the replies and reblogs of this post—look at all these people on twitter talking about their own experiences with it now too—this is actually real
and yes everyone is waiting for a catch, but remember it is a PRIVILEGE to think about not sharing this information out of spite for billionaires rather than needing this opportunity regardless of how long it lasts or if mark cuban is doing this for his own gain
so please share. thanks
hey, reminder that this is part of the movement known as effective altruism, and that it’s trying to redistribute billionaire wealth
i think it would be funny if everyone just started posting "staff start banning terfs challenge" and tagging it with #not just in june
this is literally 90% of what's in the tag right now
Piebald Culpeo (Lycalopex culpaeus) captured on trail camera in Río Clarillo National Reserve, Chile, in July 2021. It’s the first ever sighting of a culpeo with piebald markings.
Photos by Corporación Nacional Forestal (CONAF) [x]
I brought my boy Cilantro in for a bath today
Father Greg Fields. Greg is a priest who's either really good at it or really bad at it depending on your perspective and its a bit of a mystery why or even how he's a priest, as he doesn't seem particularly knowledgeable or even interested in religion in general. He sometimes gets into trouble for shit talking parishioners about things that were supposed to stay in confession.
This is so wholesome
Update: he finally got the cat to the vet to see if she had a microchip
I was already on board with his sweet wholesome open-to-love-and-nurturing heart but I was fully unprepared for getting to that last tweet and seeing how off the hook HOT dude is
CAT DAD IS BACK
aww, the kids grow up so fast. ;-;
HHHHHHHH I LOVE CAT DAD!
This is, by far, the single most adorable fucking thing I have ever seen.
update:
I love that he kept …. All of them.
I’ve reblogged the earlier part of this thread before, and the new stuff makes it even better.
This is the Tumblr equivalent of a warm hug on a cold day.
You’re welcome.
I remember this thread, but I never saw the grown-up pics ❤
All hail Catdad
I saw Catdad for the first time today, and my day instantly became exponentially better.
I’M CRYING!?
CATDAD HAS REVIVED MY WILL TO LIVE
I live for cat dad-
Cat dad has saved us all
CAT DAD!!
I had not seen the updates. I am so happy that the Cat Gods smiled upon this person and their new family :)
He’s got more recent pictures (and is also an INCREDIBLE artist), but this is the fam circa May 2020 :>
It’s been over a year? Where is cat dad? Where is he?
Fear not, CatDad is still happily with us:
sometimes I forget orchids grow on trees and I’m like. oh.
They do what now?
in the wild, most orchids grow on tree bark, a fact which will never not bring me a profound sense of delight
interestingly, orchids aren’t parasites–they are just harmless squatters hanging out with their arboreal buddies. it’s a form of commensalism–one organism benefits, the other neither benefits nor is harmed.
OK but orchids ARE parasites. They just aren’t parasites on trees. All orchids have this very bizzare lifecycle where they begin life as parasites on fungi. Here’s the rough strategy:
1. There’s a tradeoff between how much nutrients can be in a single seed and how many seeds you can make. On one end is the double coconut, the largest seed in the world weighing as much as a small child but each double coconut palm tree makes relatively few seeds per individual per season. OR. Make a fuckton of seed that individually cost very little to make. A lot of your small nonwoody plants chose this option, grasses, dandelions, any little weeds usually.
2. But there’s a limit to how far you can push this.
3. And by god orchids crossed it.
4. Orchid seeds are so fucking small they don’t have the energy stores to fucking germinate.
5. Orchid seeds are so small that they only consist of a few cells that haven’t decided who’s going to be roots or leaves yet.
6. And this is great! If you preferred habitat is in trees where the ability to disperse from one treetop to the next and find the right little spot on that tree to survive as a seedling for a few years is really hard. Lots of seed that can float on the wind and find just that spot is great for that.
7. But shit for actually, you know, being alive.
8. But orchids are crafty bastards.
9. Most plants try very hard not to be colonized by fungi, thats usually not good.
10. But orchid seeds just let fungi in.
11. And how the turn tables.
12. Because they just start eating the fungi back.
13. And this is where it gets weird.
14. Orchids are easily in the running for most diverse plant family at nearly 30,000 different species
15. And every single fucking one of them is like this.
16. And worse than that most of them are dependent on a single species of fungus to do this for them, so they produce millions of seeds just so that one might find the one right fungus.
17. And then after that anything can happen.
18. Some orchids are nice and start paying back their hosts onve they get big enough to phtotosynthesize with nice sugars.
19. Some orchids move on to as many as 30 other fungal species throughout their lives.
20. Some complete bastards keep being parasites after they are big enough to photosynthesize on their own. That’s right, a plant that can make its own food is stealing from something that lives on dead leaves.
21. Some orchids just never grow out of it, orchids have turned into permanent parasites more often than any other group of plants because they’re all parasites so becoming a full parasite is nbd.
22. And worse, most of these actually parasitize fungi that are symbiotic with forest trees that supply sugar to the fungi in return for better access to mineral nutrients, effectively making the orchids both parasites on the fungi and the trees, in a sense the whole ecosystem.
23. This leads to one more weird phenomenon. Mutant albino orchids unable to photosynthesize, of species that normally can photosynthesize, are often recorded as being able to reach maturity and flower without issue. because they just keep being parasites instead. Orchids can just. become parasites at will.
In conclusion orchids are just the weirdest fucking plants in the world. Technically all the above applies to this obscure group of ferns called the Ophioglossum family too. Same fucked up start out life as parasites and become independent (or not) later thing.
This seemed to amaze some people the most of the insect facts so to further clarify: Ants and termites have some of the same social adaptations right down to the seasonal “mating flights” by a special, winged reproductive caste, yet ants and termites have no direct relation to one another at all. Ants evolved from wasps and can still be considered a type of wasp. Termites evolved from cockroaches, and were previously considered their own separate order, but it was eventually proven that they are still full blooded roaches just a few short years ago! You can see that evolution did a whole lot more to termites than it did to ants, though. An ant at least still looks almost exactly like a wasp.
I take it as such a given, I forgot again that the ant wasp connection would really be new information to people and was just thinking the termite cockroach one was novel.
Besides the same body shape, ants also have the same kind of stingers as other wasps and bees, and having a little venomous butt needle (a modification to egg laying equipment!) Is absolutely unique in all the world to this one insect group! People think of it as an almost “generic bug thing” and put it on fictional species never considering it was invented only by a wasp ancestor! (Bees are also wasp derived)
oh oh the roach-termite connection is really cool, tho. It had some serious ramifications in the reptile-keeping hobby.
in 2010, the American population of Acheta domesticus (the brown house cricket) suffered a HUGE crash. This little cricket was the backbone of pretty much the entire reptile industry; almost everyone fed their reptiles these little guys and it vanished almost entirely overnight. What happened was Acheta domesticus densovirus, a form of cricket paralysis virus, had reached American shores.
The house cricket was especially vulnerable to this virus. It spread quickly and had an almost 100% fatality rate. It wasn’t even identified until like 2015 (and the fact that it’s a densovirus was ALSO super important because it meant almost no one was using the proper decon methods but that’s another post entirely). I can’t overstate how devastating this was for the bug industry. In addition to being fed to reptiles, crickets were also an essential scientific organism for tests and the only insect approved for human consumption.
But this left reptile hobbyists with a big problem: we didn’t have anything else to feed our little buddies. Some reptiles can be SUPER picky when it comes to their food; if they aren’t introduced to a wide variety of insects at a young age, some will just flat-out not recognize other insects as food (eg, a leopard gecko fed only mealworms might not recognize crickets). Some pet stores started stocking the Jamaican field cricket, which was a HUGE mistake. These guys are super aggressive as far as bugs go.
Enter the cockroach. Specifically, Blaptica dubia, the dubia cockroach. These guys had already been getting popular within the hobby. They’re a fairly slow growing cockroach that thrives in tropical conditions, so they’re a low escape risk in most of the US. They can’t climb slick plastic or glass, they can’t really fly, they don’t stink, they’re quiet, and super easy to raise. They were the ideal feeder insect. I’ve been keeping them for almost 10 years now. Honestly, I think they’re kinda cute.
Their popularity exploded. In captivity, the average dubia roach has a lifespan of about 2-3 years. They begin breeding at around 6 months, each female producing around 20-30 babies per month. But I noticed that my colony wasn’t quite thriving. Sure, my females were breeding, but they were dropping dead at around a year and a half. I reached out to other hobbyists and they were having similar problems. We compared a lot of notes: we had the right temps, the right humidity, everything seemed just about perfect. A lot of people didn’t care TOO much. After all, their females were still keeping up with the demand. The only meal that really mattered was the final one, right?
No one thought much about it seriously, honestly, until reptile hobbyists started noticing our reptiles getting kidney problems. Specifically, gout and uric acid build-up, primarily among reptiles being fed mostly dubia roaches. This was a HUGE deal in the hobby. Like Allen Repashy was in on this, since a lot of the dying roaches were being fed on his bug burger formula.
The problem was, bug burger was designed to be a high protein diet. It was designed for crickets and no one really considered reformulating it for roaches. Why would they? Roaches eat anything, right?
In crickets, a high protein diet is perfect. It’s what they thrive on. But roaches… they’re more like termites. I think it was in 2017 that someone finally started delving into how termites digest wood and realized that these guys EXCEL at extracting protein from all kinds of sources. What’s a low protein diet to anyone else is Just Right for them.
And that’s when people started thinking about uric acid build-up in roaches again. We realized that it was the high protein diet that was seriously fucking up our bugs and, by extension, our reptiles. This roach-termite connection COMPLETELY changed the way we fed our roaches. It’s no longer recommended to feed them fish flakes or cat food. Repashy was one of the first people to redo a bug formula specifically for roaches and call attention to this issue.
This has an autofill form and can be done in about a minute, which is great for people like me who would rather run onto a busy highway than make a phone call.
Fanfiction, erotica and romance novels, art, or pretty much anything. Books can be dropped off seller platforms for any suggestion of “pornography” that is even more loosely defined than “female-presenting nipples” here on tumblr. This sort of censorship can and will be broadened to include subjects people want to suppress. If you think Maus being banned in Tennessee was bad, please brace yourself for it to happen across all platforms. The rallying cry of “BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN” is just a ploy for zealots to get a handhold over the general populace, so if the idea of that repulses you, please go make your voice heard.
i dont feel like coloring it so its not going on my art blog rn but i love drawing my scrimblo
10/250
110/250 holy shit yall are amazing
Steam recommendation algorithm: Okay, I’ve got one I’m sure you’ll love this time.
Me: You mean like when you were sure I’d love that game about dating the moé personification of the Soviet Union?
Steam: This time I’ve got it for sure.
Me: Your track record certainly speaks for itself.
Steam: Just hear me out.
Okay: All right, fine, what—
Steam: What if Cthulhu had huge boobs?
Me: … you’re serious.
Steam: Just a pair of eldritch dobonhonkeros.
Me: I don’t—
Steam: Blasphemous bonkhonagahoogs!
Me: You can stop now.
