generic side blog #42

*chanting quietly* tree law tree law tree law tree law

*chanting quietly* tree law tree law tree law tree law

https://improbable.com/2017/08/14/shocking-mushrooms-technique-report/?amp=1

They have lightning dispensers!

i don’t make the rules AT ALL, but if you mostly spend time in Gay People Spaces then you know about 28 ppl who look like this 

holy shit in-n-out burger updated their policy to explicitly BAN staff from wearing masks at work???? (unless they have a doctor’s note)… EVIL

NIGHTMARE

https://mailchi.mp/innout/mask-policy-update-for-az-co-nv-tx-ut-associates

see these tweet threads here and here

useful thread

Source

Madam, you are looking very posh in your fancy dress, if I may say so.

Those earrings are a delight, darling and I love what you did with your hair.

Underwater Footage Captures a Blanket Octopus Revealing Her Billowing Iridescent Membrane

Your billowing iridescent membrane is beautiful queen

David Cleary!

i'm in Ireland and the search for that bastards name is still blocked and hidden... the legnths the british go to defend and protect their instruments of colonialism and violence is beyond belief. no justice for the victims and yet every measure taken to protect David James Cleary and his fellow murderers.

Never a better time for the Streisand Effect than when it's a government covering up acts of brutality and evil.

Of course the big news first.

🦉. Hunter is canonically bisexual and Willow is pansexual!

🦉. Eda carved Owlbert as a reference of the owlbeast

🦉. Lilith and Amity reconected their mentor-student relationship! Amity is really interested in Lilith's knowledge on the boiling isles

🦉. Hunter and Amity would've interacted more if they had another season

🦉. The name of King's father is unpronounceable because hes a titan, buuut "father" works really well :)

🦉. The Collector does not have a "glow up" because they're a inmortal space kid and it works different for them. They probably grew a few inches tho.

🦉.Raine moved to the owl house and lives with Eda now

I’m not anti-technology, I just think there’s something deeply sick about a society where robots make art and children work in factories.

“You can’t carry anymore meals!” i can’t believe what i’m reading

Tears of the Kingdom is a cooking game with rpg elements. why would they do this

Popehat pointed me to this distinctly Orwellian transcript from a federal court case, in which the defendant, who wants to plead guilty, asks if she has to affirm in the plea agreement that her public defender did an adequate job when he’d actually missed all their meetings, missed key court deadlines, and couldn’t answer questions about what she was charged with:

The judge says that if she doesn’t want to go to trial and probably get life in prison, she has to plead guilty, and she’s not allowed to plead guilty until she affirms that she was competently advised by her counsel. If she will not agree that she was competently advised, it goes to trial, and her trial lawyer will be the one who missed meetings with her and a life sentence is on the line.

She affirms that she was competently advised by her counsel.

The whole thing is just nightmarish, but to me the most nightmarish bit is that it was over a marijuana dealing operation. She was facing life in prison, she got 121 months with the plea, this whole charade of a just system charaded along, over her boyfriend growing and selling weed.

So, uh, have your usual reminder that fuck the American criminal justice system.

You've heard of Earth is space australia now get ready for: Earth is the space Amazon Rainforest. Aliens land on Earth and they are losing their goddamn minds because every square inch of the ground is absolutely PACKED with life like there are hundreds of species just in this one site, there are winged animals flying through the sky and multiple colonies of sophisticated social insects just in the shadow of their ship, this ONE ROCK is covered in MULTIPLE SPECIES OF ORGANISMS that are themselves MULTIPLE ORGANISMS LIVING SYMBIOTICALLY, the tall, woody autotrophs look so different from each other because they're...holy shit that's like 5, 6, 7???? different species on this one site???

they start talking to a human and the human is like "haha yeah that's a crow!" and the alien researcher is like "you called it a 'bird' earlier, is that a different name?" and the human is like "oh a crow is just one species of bird, there's like, 10 others out there"

"On this planet?"

"No, in the back yard right now."

imagine aliens that come from a tidally locked planet where only a thin band of the planet is habitable, or a planet life was only able to develop in small areas at the poles, or in the few pools of liquid water on the planet's surface, or just in isolated areas where geologic activity causes geysers and springs, visiting Earth. They seem completely unprepared for the shock of realizing that Earth's continents appear green because the continents are absolutely covered with green organisms.

The alien biologists are so uncomfortable because there are certain protocols for maintaining certain distances from life signatures to avoid harming unfamiliar organisms, and groves of plant like autotrophs and pools where aquatic life dwells are carefully protected and respected, with very important rules for approach

On Earth, the inhabitants are just. Playing and walking LITERALLY STEPPING ON CARPETS OF ORGANISMS the whole time. the aliens are like "it doesn't hurt them??? Can't you just...move them to a place where you don't have to step on them?" and the humans are like "no of course not, grasses evolved to tolerate being stepped on, and besides, more plants would grow there if we tried to move the existing ones"

It then must be explained that humans would need to regularly spray poisons on the ground to prevent any given area of bare soil from filling up with plant life, and that "regularly" means "multiple times within a single solar cycle." And that the poisons stop working within a few decades because the plants evolve to resist them that fast.

Human: yeah solar is the dominant energy source these days but some of the recent solar farm projects are pretty controversial because they're in reclaimed strip mining sites that others argue should be restored as best as we can to their previous ecological state

Alien: I don't understand...why would you not place the solar farms in an area of the planet with no existing ecosystem?

Human: ...what?

Alien: You have rather sophisticated protective gear and have done some space exploration, surely you could establish them in an area of the planet to which life is not yet adapted?

Human: ...there isn't one.

Alien: ...what do you mean there isn't one

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU 'DON'T KNOW' HOW MANY SPECIES THERE ARE"

"Our biologists would love to collaborate with your Earth scientists to draw up a definitive listing of Earth species and resolve any inconsistencies in the records."

"I don't think you understand what I'm saying. Only 25% of Earth's species have been formally described, at most."

"that's...that's most of them."

"Yes?"

"Well...I suppose the ocean trenches and abyssal plains must be difficult for you to reach...where did you have to travel for your discoveries?"

"Travel? I moved here to Alabama in the first place to study its aquatic ecosystems. The crayfish I discovered live in that creek I showed you earlier."

Oh I LOVE this. Here’s some fun stuff, I can make it worse!

“We’ll just get a sterile soil sample for comparison.”

“From where?”

“Antarctica, surely the soils there are abiotic. Some don’t see liquid water for centuries.”

“Nope, those soils are full of life. Lichens, bacteria, archaea. We actually haven’t found a place on earth with a sterile soil.” (Unless a certain paper has gone through peer review)

“What if we dig deeper?”

“Like 2.8 km (1.7 miles) down a South African gold mine in a puddle of radioactive groundwater?”

“Yes! SURELY that is far enough that no living organism lives there.”

“…”

“SURELY.”

“So there is one guy there.”

(Desulforudis audaxviator my beloved)

“Ok.” (Cracks alien knuckles) “I will collect a sample from the BOTTOM of a ‘black smoker’ hydrothermal vents 2000 m deep in the ocean. The water there is sterile.”

“You’re probably right about the water being sterile but-“

“NO”

“-but… the rock isn’t even at the bottom, that’s where Methanopyrus was found, it can grow at a balmy 122 C (251 F). And can survive long periods at temperatures higher than that. Plenty of archaea have their most optimum grown temperatures above 100C (212 F). That’s the temperature they grow BEST at.”

“Stop.”

“We keep finding higher limits, some think it can reach to 150 C (302 F). We’re pretty sure nothing lives above 250 C (482 F) because we can’t find measurable amounts of DNA, RNA or proteins in water that hot, if that helps you feel better.”

“IT DOES NOT.”

“Sorry, life uh, finds a way.”

“Aha! We didn’t try cold. How about the coldest place in the universe, where you have reached a few fractions of a degree above absolute 0 Kelvin?” (1K = -457.87 F)

“I have bad news about quantum entangled tardigrades. They aren’t alive at the time though! That would count, right?”

“Not alive… at the time.”

“Yeah. Oh but they aren’t dead either.”

*(Screams)*

(Brock biology of microorganisms 2014, looks like the info is still correct, lmk if not) also soils here are Soils proper, not agricultural soils. Those are not real soils. And I heard a presentation on unpublished data on sterile soils, haven’t found the paper if it has been published.

Reblogging from my personal. Might draw this one day. That’d be interesting. Hm.

So there are some perks to living in a tourist destination. There are a lot of detractors mostly that you cannot shoot the tourists because you rely on them for your income but you have a semi captive audience with no context for any of the bullshit you spew. You can tell these people anything and they will believe you, the trusted friendly local. Now this is a very much Spider-Man situation where Great Power begets Great Audacity and even worse Responsibility.

My buddy goes on a run and when hes done there is a bar near a creek. So he wades into the creek because the day is hot and the water is cold.

Tourists ask what hes up to, with his running stuff he didn't want wet piled on the shore and him very obviously cooling off in the water. He says he's fishing.

But now here is why I am telling you this story. The universe occasionally aligns in such a way that we get to really really fuck with people and their perception of said universe. The opportunities do not come often and when they come you must seize the day. This is what my buddy did.

So this Creek runs through town and as a result of the highway and neighborhoods and culverts and roads it does not have a great salmon run. It's a short Creek the headwaters are only a few miles from the ocean it never had a great salmon run to begin with. But there are salmon.

One such fish brushes past my buddy's leg. Immediately he knees the fish like he is juggling a soccer ball and pops it out of the water, then slaps it out of the air on to the shore.

This is dumb luck. He could not do this again if he spent years training. Noodling (catching fish with your hands) is a thing that is legal to do with salmon but it is so much harder than literally every other way to catch salmon, including grabbing them with a garbage can. What he just managed is the kind of thing that should make you want to grab the fish and swing it around your head like a stripper with her panties off.

But,

He has an audience.

This is the opportunity offered by the universe.

He plays it cool.

He puts on dead pan straight face on and wades up to shore to grab his fish and nod to the tourists. Someone asks something and he assures them this is the standard way to get a quick dinner here. The tour guide has caught up with his group. He looks at my buddy and his fish and the general lack of fishing accoutrement. Without missing a beat, the guide backs up every ounce of bullshit out of my buddys mouth because if there is one true fraternity it is locals bullshitting stupid tourists.

there’s a thing I think about sometimes when I’m writing that I call ‘the rabies condition’

by which I mean: there are no contraindications to getting the rabies vaccine for post-exposure prophylaxis.

every other vaccine usually has a few contraindications like ‘don’t take this if you’re allergic to it’ or ‘if you’re pregnant discuss the risks and benefits with your doctor’ or ‘don’t give to children below age 6′ or something, but not the rabies vaccine. if you’ve been exposed to rabies, there is literally no medical reason that can justify not getting the rabies vaccine–you can be deadly allergic to literally every single ingredient and the correct decision is still to administer the vaccine, because if you don’t, you’re 100% guaranteed to die of rabies. even the life-threatening allergies are a step up in survival rate (especially since anaphylaxis is something that can be managed, even if there are risks associated with it)

which is to say, the rabies condition: if a character has been ‘exposed to rabies’, aka, in some impending absolute worst-case scenario, like the apocalypse or some death curse or the destruction of their entire city via demons or whatever, then that character has to take action and the consequences and risks no longer matter, because literally any other outcome would be better, and 1% chance of survival is still better than 0%. that doesn’t make those actions necessarily good, the same way that injecting yourself with something you know you’re deadly allergic not a good thing to do, but it’s still better than dying horrifically of rabies. desperate times and desperate measures etc

and then, after your character’s prevented some horrible thing by doing some almost equally bad thing, they should absolutely experience the consequences of those choices.

subtitles should be on automatically. people who don’t want them should have to turn them off

i’m not a girl i’m not a boy i’m like. a playstation 2

absofuckinlutely not

You’re just continuing a long line of retail tradition babey