every day millions  of  fish r violently wripped from the ocean by birdkind and as they die they exoerience such transcendent altitudes  their brains level up like crazy

1: Cheese Manakeesh (cheese pies)

2: Homemade Hummus w/ chicken koufta

3: Msakhan (the National dish of Palestine)

4: Sfeeha (meet pies)

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We moved! Still unpacking and putting final touches on the house

Sunny is helping with painting.*

*) This was a fresh, never used roller sleeve, and I gently encouraged Sunny to let go after he'd mistakenly grabbed it. Everyone came away unscathed, if somewhat confused.

Thomas Cameron (Scottish, b. 1992)

Fruit Shop Hong Kong, 2023

Oil on canvas

Someone captured the solar eclipse on an airplane

so long for now everyone! me and my lads are off to witness the phenomena

wow. good phenomena.

トラツグミ。 Scaly Thrush.

the world is so beautiful

“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”

Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.

Some recent ootds 💕

The Joy of Photographing People, 1983

preening Scolopendra dehaani “Highland Cherry Red” baby

when they’re your primary means of sensing the world, it pays to keep your antennae clean! centipedes almost always clean both at a time, first one, then the other. it’s charming to see those deadly forcipules used to gently hook down an antenna

Feutre du Baou, raw felted wool dyed with plants 

Dendrogaster (a crustacean that parasitizes starfish)

this is how they look

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, CRUSTACEAN.

my tags need to go in the main part of the post actually

this is what im talking about that's fucking horrible. worth noting though that the crustaceans are a broad class of marine animal which include barnacles and such as well as the usual suspects. so the nightmarish vision of a crab evolving into that terrible thing is thankfully not true

IMPORTANT UPDATE FROM @velociraptrix BARNACLES ARE DESCENDED FROM MOBILE LEG HAVING NORMAL ANIMALS. hell world hell world hell world

Oh, it gets better. Barnacles aren't just descended from mobile leg having normal animals, they ARE mobile leg having normal animals! A barnacle larva looks like this:

Waldo Nell, flickr ... and do they ever swim around. Quickly. Effectively. Tirelessly. It's only at barnacle puberty that they stick themselves upside down to a convenient rock and scramble their body plan through metamorphosis. The feeding tendrils (cirri) on adult barnacles are actually the remaining legs! See?

Matt Lau, Point Reyes National Park Yeah... There is in fact a group of barnacles, called the Rhizocephala, that do the ungodly horrorparasite thing. Instead of finding a rock or section of timber, that normal looking larva finds the skin of a host. Instead of turning upside down and growing a shell, it expels a tiny, featureless glob of cells that burrows into the host and begins to grow. And grow. And grow. The resulting animal has no symmetry, no segments, no organs except ovaries. It is a filigreed tangle of thirsty roots, weaving into the host's body, stealing its shape and drinking its life.

And the hosts are?

Conventional crustaceans, like this hermit crab here!! Worst family dinner ever! Yeah if you sequenced the genomes of these entwined bodies you would register kin. There are barnacle relatives that we've only ever seen as larvae because they're parasites and we can't find the host. Hundreds of years of careful documentation and we do not know what they turn into. What a lovely, terrifying mystery!

more moss piglet

Shibam - This ~1,700-year-old walled city in Yemen is considered to be the oldest vertically constructed city in the world. Its trapezoidal buildings (most were built in the 16th century) are made of mud bricks and need constant maintenance due to rain and wind erosion.