supervisor at work desperately wants me to try her herbal mushroom coffee and I looked at the insert and it has cordyceps in it ‘for stamina’ and don’t get me wrong I’m sure it’s a normal edible non-parasitic variety but there IS a little part of me that’s like. oh so that’s what they’re calling it now
me when I drink it
Iceland is fucking bizarre my name change made the news
Like just @ me at this point I'm literally the only person in iceland (and very possibly the world) who has the first name Lauf
(Article title reads "Lauf and Birningur in group of new names in the name register")
No one lives here so now two of our biggest news outlets are vagueing about me lmao
Hmm you're right. Correction: two of our biggest media outlets are talking about me specifically because they are obsessed with me
This morning I showed up to work and my boss was like "congratulations :))" and I was kinda confused so asked her on what and she said "your name, I heard about it on the radio"
So far I have counted two online articles and apparently the radio is also talking about my name change so I'll keep you guys updated when I'm on national tv or something
With a little legwork we can make more people on Tumblr see this than the entire population of Iceland.
Have you no love for him?
Updated for tumblr news formatting
It's not <3 but that's ok
Eyes on the prize besties
Yes you can lol
Or at least on android you can
Yoooo exactly 90.000 notes damn also idk what's happening either
Actually now that I have my phone switched to Icelandic for once I just noticed that on spotify "liked songs" is now "lækuð lög"
My first thought was "oh but that's kinda lazy since 'læk' is just borrowed from English" (it's literally just the English word 'like' but with Icelandic spelling)
My second thought immediately following that was "shouldn't it be 'líkuð lög' instead?" (Since 'lög sem þér líkar við' is a bit of a mouthful)
The flaw here is that "líkuð" is not a real word in Icelandic, even though in this context it feels like it should be. If it were a word though, it would be a different form of the word "lík", which means corpse.
So, corpsed songs. I guess I'm more okay with using the word "lækuð" now, even if it does feel a bit lazy.
The guy who taught me Icelandic at HÍ is Danish, and has recently become an Icelandic citizen. Because of this, his name also made the news because he wanted to change the spelling of his Danish last name to the Icelandic spelling. So now I technically kinda sorta know two people whose names made it to the news in Iceland.
Do you even live in Iceland if your name hasn't made the news at least once
Actually yeah. My other Icelandic teacher is Serbian, and since she (at least unofficially like as an artsy poet's pseudonym) uses the Icelandic versions of her parents' names as her last names, I think she's also made the news. The news might have been more about the poetry than the name, but yeah. Getting into the news in Iceland apparently isn't that hard.
I've been in the news like 7 times at least it's really not that hard
Things I've been in the news for include but are not limited to:
I think this happened when I was 10 years old but anyway here's a couple things you need to know for this story to make sense
So anyway my siblings and I didn't know this but our mum was kind of entering a new relationship at the time, it was only their third date so she didn't want to introduce him to us just yet so in order to see him without any of us knowing yet she asked our grandma to take us with her for an afternoon to our great grandparents' cabin in the countryside. This was completely fine and we'd been there a bunch of times before and it was always pretty fun so I was fairly excited. On the way there though I spotted a herd of horses standing pretty close to the road not too far from the cabin so as soon as we got there I decided to tell my grandma that I was gonna go for a quick walk to get some fresh air (she totally knew I was gonna go find the horses lmao) and she was okay with it since I knew the area pretty well and it wasn't far away.
Anyway I get to the point where I thought I saw the horses and they aren't there. F, but what can you do? I did look around a little bit more and that's when I spotted another herd of horses (or maybe it was the same one, idk) off in the distance standing in the middle of a field.
At this point I was excited again and while I was a little hesitant to leave the road I figured it would just be a quick trip back and forth so no real harm done. Besides, it's a field, how hard can it be to find the road again?
Apparently very hard because once I was about halfway across the field to where I'd seen the horses I looked up (I'd had to keep my head down for most of the trip so I wouldn't trip since the ground was very uneven) and suddenly the horses weren't there anymore. At this point I admit defeat and turn around except as I'm walking back I'm not finding the road either. I was totally fucked and I knew it.
After thinking it over for a bit I decided to just pick a direction and walk until I reach a road. Idk how long I walked for but I did eventually find one but I had no clue where I was and there was very little traffic around so I figured I'd just walk along the road for a bit until, idk, something happened. After a while I came to a stop and wouldn't you know it, there was a herd of horses there.
I had already accepted that I had no clue where the fuck I was and help probably would not be coming any time soon (in my child brain I was like "ok so it takes 24 hours for someone to officially be declared missing so I guess I'll just hang around here for a day and hope someone finds me sooner rather than later") I also figured I would be easier to find if I stopped moving so I decided that the best course of action was to just stay there with the horses.
It wasn't too bad all things considered, time did go by a bit quicker when I had the horses there for entertainment. They were very calm and gentle and I even laid down to rest with them for a while. I did spot a building in the distance at some point and decided to make my way towards it hoping to maybe find someone there or at least get some shelter.
Unfortunately since there was a lot of wetland around this area (the horses were fenced off from it) I did fall into a mire and had both of my legs submerged in mud up to my knees. This was when my survival instincts really kicked in since I knew damn well that past a certain point I wasn't getting back out of there alive. Thankfully there was some tall grass surrounding it that was much more firmly rooted so that gave me something to grab onto and pull myself free. (Idk how I managed to not panic tbh, I was essentially facing everyone's childhood fear of falling into quicksand. I did lose both of my shoes in the process of getting myself out but considering I had just avoided possibly the worst way of dying out in the wilderness I was okay with that)
After that I made my way back to the horses and just kinda chilled out waiting for someone to rescue me. Eventually a truck driver spotted me and asked if I was the missing kid on the radio (I, stupidly, went "I don't think I've been declared missing yet" as if there was some other missing child matching my description in the area. He knew my name though so I got in the truck and he drove me to the next farm.) After talking for a bit he told me those were his wife's horses and I told him they were very well tamed. I remember he paused for a bit and then said "none of them are tamed yet"
Eventually the police picked me up and drove me to our cabin, where I was met with pretty much my entire extended family anxiously standing outside. This was how I met my step dad after he had accompanied my mum there for support, covered in mud and stepping out of a police car after apparently having dropped off the face of the earth for five hours.
After this my zoloft dosage was significantly lowered by my psychiatrist. I also got cool new shoes (they were purple)
Also turns out you are officially declared missing wayyyy faster if you are a small child and at risk of, idk, falling into a mire or something.
So you just speedran every Whimsical Childhood Adventure all at once huh.
That’s a pretty good story Lauf but we’re gonna need more than that to get to 300k. Let’s have the knitting story.
bored border collie: im going to perform psychological experiments on every human member of my household
bored pit bull: i bet i could eat a rock if i tried hard enough
some of my favorite tags
3 sentence horror story
she got u a valentine
it was really hard work to make it!
do u like ur valentine?
oh, good!
Anyway today I learned that kookaburras give courtship gifts! In the form of dead baby birds that they absolutely goddamn pulverized to death
more aussie nonsense
back on my bullshit again (my bullshit is going to Australia)
a ship with a dinosaur figurehead would be cool
What We Do in the Shadows // S01E09: The Orgy
I know they're not fish but have you ever considered horseshoe crab anthro?
God anon you are not making it easy for me but I'm not backing down from a challenge.
the paralyzed cicadas I picked up from a failed cicada killer nest are the perfect material to show off some cool features of insect anatomy! (although the wasp’s venom would keep them alive for her larvae to eat, I froze them to make sure they’re fully dead for dissection).
cicadas are powerful, fast fliers, and all of their thorax is taken up by a bulk of reddish, stringy flight muscles, which I’ll talk more about later. this cicada is a female, so her abdomen is full of white, elongated eggs that she will insert into tree bark with the bladed ovipositor at her rear.
the male cicada’s abdomen, however, is almost entirely empty, and that air-filled space is used as a resonator for his loud calls. the biggest structure visible there is a curved pair of muscles that deforms the tymbals, producing a click with every contraction.
here's a view of the complete muscle, and the tymbals themselves which look like overlapping plates on his belly. if you're curious what the white frosted appearance is, some Neotibicen have a coat of waxy powder or pruinescence; this male N. tibicen is particularly pruinose.
onto the flight muscles:
powered flight is a pretty complex mechanism in any organism, and is never so simple as just flapping wings up and down, but most insects power their flight in a really unintuitive way (at least for us vertebrates): they contract muscles in their thorax that aren’t even attached to the wings!
this method of flight is called indirect flight, in contrast to the direct flight of the dragonflies and mayflies where each of four wings is directly attached to a muscle and can flap on its own.
instead, most insects have a longitudinal (image 1 above, d below) pair and a vertical (2, c) pair of muscles that deform the shape of abdomen, pulling the upper segment of the thorax (notum) up and down, and this moves the wings which are attached to the notum. useful indirect flight gif from wikipedia found here
even if compressed manually, the dead cicadas "flap" their wings due to the motion of the notum:
insect flight is a lot more complicated than this simplified look at them, but I think these cicadas offer a pretty good look at how most insects get around essentially by squishing themselves internally!
“Overcast Catch”
Gavialis bengawanicus with it’s captured quarry for #paleonusantara
Xena: Warrior Princess (1995 - 2001) ⤷ Fave Episodes: S2 EP15 "A Day in the Life"
I played enough of that taxonomy guessing game to devise a goddamn strategy, and I'm annoyed by this.
I've been guessing everything pretty consistently in 3-6 guesses, except the goddamn nonpasserines because their nonpasserines are a mess of a polytomy.
Your first guess should be either a crow or a big cat because it's heavily biased towards birds and carnivores. This lets you narrow it down pretty quickly to what kind of animal you're dealing with.
If it's a non-passerine neognath that isn't fowl, good fucking luck.
If it's a teleost fish, salmon should get you narrowed.
If it's a laurasiathere, guess dolphin or cow to narrow down the artiodactlys. If it's a Boreoeutherian, guessing mouse should winnow down the glires quickly, or direct you over to primates, where human or chimp allow your next guess to be correct, since their taxonomy is (Lemur(Capuchin(Mandrill(Gibbon(Orangutan(Gorilla(Chimp+Human)))))))
There are only three afrotheres, three xenarthrans, four marsupials, and two monotremes, so the rest of the mammals are easy.
On the offhand chance that it's a protostome, guess a honey bee. It has five hymenopterans, and that should winnow things pretty fast on that side of the tree
If it's none of those, guessing anemone first will narrow down the three cnidarians since anemones+corals form a clade to the exclusion of jellyfish.
ANYWAY what are y'all doing with your free time
A different, equally entertaining way to play the game is to try to build as complete of a tree as you can to the organism.
This approach got me 'walrus' in twenty guesses because the goddamn caniform carnivores are a disaster polytomy.
(Pinnipeds should be a goddamn clade damnit)
I played enough of that taxonomy guessing game to devise a goddamn strategy, and I'm annoyed by this.
I've been guessing everything pretty consistently in 3-6 guesses, except the goddamn nonpasserines because their nonpasserines are a mess of a polytomy.
Your first guess should be either a crow or a big cat because it's heavily biased towards birds and carnivores. This lets you narrow it down pretty quickly to what kind of animal you're dealing with.
If it's a non-passerine neognath that isn't fowl, good fucking luck.
If it's a teleost fish, salmon should get you narrowed.
If it's a laurasiathere, guess dolphin or cow to narrow down the artiodactlys. If it's a Boreoeutherian, guessing mouse should winnow down the glires quickly, or direct you over to primates, where human or chimp allow your next guess to be correct, since their taxonomy is (Lemur(Capuchin(Mandrill(Gibbon(Orangutan(Gorilla(Chimp+Human)))))))
There are only three afrotheres, three xenarthrans, four marsupials, and two monotremes, so the rest of the mammals are easy.
On the offhand chance that it's a protostome, guess a honey bee. It has five hymenopterans, and that should winnow things pretty fast on that side of the tree
If it's none of those, guessing anemone first will narrow down the three cnidarians since anemones+corals form a clade to the exclusion of jellyfish.
ANYWAY what are y'all doing with your free time
guys i just found out about this site that does a daily guessing game, it’s phylogenetic wordle- so fun!!!
They put European robins in Turdidae even though their little informational box even says they're old world flycatchers 😭
AMERICAN robins are thrushes! (Practice game screenshot, not a spoiler)
the transgender experience of seeing a fictional character undergo an extremely painful but rapid transformation like growing and twisting into an enormous wolflike beast or having wings burst bloodily from their back and going god i wish that were me
the desire to not just change but be transformed into something else that is visibly different but still you. the need for that change to be something undeniable that you cannot simply look away from or pretend to ignore.
My first biology professor had an ‘inadequacy drawer’ full of things to remind him he wasn’t, in fact, the dumbest and laziest person to ever exist. It was mostly Darwin, notably these two bits:
‘But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.’
‘I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids and today I hate them worse than everything.’
“I am at work on the second vol. of the Cirripedia, of which creatures I am wonderfully tired: I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.”
-Charles Darwin on a letter to his cousin
Charles Darwin: unexpected depression hero.
I knew about “I am very poorly and very stupid and hate everybody and everything,” but not the others.
“I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees” is A Mood.
My favorite Darwinism: “I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects”. Hits me right at the center of my hyperfixated soul.
I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before
“The work has been turning out badly for me this morning and I am sick at heart and oh my God how I do hate species & varieties”
