moment of silence for everyone who relied on AI chat bots for research when it’s going around saying shit like this.

[image description: search that reads “country in africa that starts with K”. the featured snipped is from www.emergentmind.com and reads “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter "K". The closest is Kenya, which starts with a "K" sound, but is actually spelled with a "K" sound. It's always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.” /end ID]

When people say "defund the police is too scary" ask them how scary this graphic is and ask if the funding police get correlates to the conditions in the city or if that same money would be better off reallocated to... Let's say a fucking library

every so often I remember that whales molt

I’m not sure why I feel this way, but imo this is the most cursed marine mammal fact I have ever heard

THAT’S RIGHT AND THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME SO I CAN INFLICT THIS ON EVERYONE AT 1AM!

Mammals normally shed their skin in small flakes all the time when their skin cells die off, but because whales are living in the ocean -AKA, Bacteria Stew- flaking off like that would cause microabrasions (really tiny cuts) that would mean the whale is continually fighting off infections.  So, when a whale needs to replace it’s dead skin cells, it preps it’s new skin underneath, then sheds all it’s dead skin cells at once, like a lizard:

but not having hands makes it hard to remove this gross film, so molting brings many whales clsoe to shore where they can roll around on rocky/sandy coastal seabeds to scratch it off.  Here’s a bunch of Beluga coming in for a mass scratch:

And THIS is what a chunk of Sperm Whale Molt looks like, floating in the water before it’s devoured by pelagic microfauna, because you take what calories you can get in the open ocean:

Nature is Amazing!

wish it still held in one big piece like a snake though. Wish you could be swimming in the ocean and you see a huge empty whale billowing like a balloon. like a latex glove a hundred feet long. imagine getting tangled in that. what if you died cause you got caught in an empty whale like it’s a big blanket

I love your thinkin @bogleech this’s is givin me ✨ideas✨, I’m probably never gonna use ‘em but they’re there is I need ‘em

I also JUST realized this is undoubtedly the "cryptid" this one scuba diver claimed to see. He said a giant "amoeba" floated up from the deep, made the surrounding water colder, then engulfed a shark and returned back to the trench.

Obviously a current blew a whale skin up from deeper water and a shark blundered into it, then kept on swimming anyway. Maybe it was a nice tasty treat??

Chinese sellers on Aliexpress are trying to sell giant land snail eggs as "Little Hatch Toys" which is adorable and hilarious except of course that this is the most illegal animal in the United States and even a zoo or scientific institution would get in trouble for having any

Seeing people shoot raptors in other countries is fucking wild to me because we have a whole system of super strict laws governing how you can handle an individual FEATHER off of an eagle, and it doesn't have to even be a dead eagle. One can molt and you can find it on the ground and if you're caught with it the warden will fuck your entire life. What do you mean people are out there shooting them to protect a fucking pheasant. A pheasant??? That thing I have to avoid running over approximately 459 times any time I leave a major highway???

My good friend @prismaticate has asked a very good question here, and while I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to explain it and would love some input from more qualified sources, my SUPER simplified understanding of why the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its numerous modern revisions and addendums have clauses about this included is this:

-It’s basically impossible to tell a feather that’s been picked up off the ground from one that’s been taken from a poached bird

-This used to be a MAJOR problem when bird-feather hats and the like were in high demand back in the day, because several bird species on the edge of extinction kept getting poached in spite of the new laws protecting them since people would just say they “found” any feathers from protected species used in the stuff they were selling, and you couldn’t prove otherwise unless you literally caught them in the act of poaching

-This eventually got SO bad that they had to just make it illegal to have the feathers at all, with certain exceptions made for members of different indigenous groups, or authorized organizations that display them as part of efforts to educate the public about the species they belong to

@zooophagous is this a reasonable rundown? Was there anything I missed/any better sources you might recommend to learn more about this? I know it’s probably far more nuanced than that, but this was kind of the explanation I’d always seen floating around. 😅

That's pretty much the gist of it! Eagles and eagle feathers have more laws on top of that because of their sacred uses in certain indigenous practices, how they relate to legal falconry, and because eagles at one time were highly endangered while at the same time being a national symbol. Where a cop or a game warden may shrug and look the other way if you, say, illegally picked up a chickadee feather from your bird feeder, if they see a real eagle feather they will notice and will be VERY interested in where it came from.

Not long ago here someone was arrested and charged for violating these laws because they tried to sell a plains feather bonnet at a pawn shop, claiming they had "found it while exploring an abandoned house."

The clerk suspected it was real eagle, the warden confirmed it was, and because those feathers are so tightly tracked they were able to locate the family of the previous owners who said the item had been stolen some time ago.

If nobody knows you have it, obviously you can get away with it. But if they see it, or God forbid you try to SELL it, the hammer will fall.

Im surprised every time people think it's a crazy sounding law, it is genuinely one of the only things preventing a lot of native birds from extinction or any asshole could kill as many as they want and just say they found them on the ground

I'm not shocked that there's an episode of SpongeBob in which he is accidentally deep fried and eaten by Mrs Puff but did those two things truly need to look like this.

Atlas Technical Project Manager:

“Atlas is no longer involved [in Cop City]…because you guys are fucking nightmares and you broke all of our fucking windows”

Ahahahah, I thought this was paraphrased but that is a direct quote.

Direct action works.

:3

good!

Instead of being an automatic fail, a Natural 1 will result in a success that is done in such a way that it is one of the worst outcomes possible.

Nat 1 for shooting someone with a bow and arrow? The bow is the one that is fired and hits the target. Go and get it.

Nat 1 on a perception check? Accidentally find out universal truths that result in 3d6 psychic damage.

Nat 1 for deception? You start to believe what you are saying to be true.

The possibilities are endless

VERY major pikmin 4 spoilers under cut !!!

The timeline for Pikmin 2 is so funny because like, Olimar's been missing-presumed-dead for an entire month (rightfully so, considering how very dead Olimar should have been with the events in Pikmin 1) and he escapes by the skin of his teeth and beelines it back home with the desperate desire to see his wife and children who've probably been starring on Dateline: Hocotate every day for the last month to be grilled about their tragically missing father.

And instead. Instead. The absolute literal second Olimar's ship docks down, his fucking boss of all people comes running out of the woodwork and shakes him by the shoulders going "Terrible news Olimar your new coworker fucked up and now we're $10 million in debt! Go immediately back to that planet you escaped from and hunt its wildlife to extinction in order to collect enough valuable treasure to pay this off."

Like we're not even gonna let Olimar brush his teeth huh? Not gonna shove some antibiotics in him for the undiscovered foreign pathogens clinging to his suit? This man survived 30 days on 10 days of emergency rations and probably a few bulborbs once he got hungry enough to no longer care about the parasites. Not a hello? Not a 'you're alive'? Not a coffee?

What the hell does this even look like from the President's perspective? Your shipwrecked presumed dead employee whose life insurance policy paperwork is sitting on your desk shows back up out of the literal sky, down 20% of his bodyweight covered in superficial injuries smelling like gangrene and carrying himself with the haunted and (no, dare I say, passionate?) look in his eyes of someone who has learned to indiscriminately kill for the sake of survival.

And your first thought is "oh thank god my single competent employee isn't actually dead. I need to exploit him as soon as possible."

President's so fucking lucky Olimar is both a broken salaryman and also deranged enough to find wonder in the hostile world that so very wants to rip him to pieces. If I were Olimar I'd have killed President and Louie on the spot.

this is the same girl in a raincoat

Because I'm only seeing other Jews posting about this, non-Jews I need you to be aware that for the past month or two there has been a wave of bomb threats and swattings at synagogues all across the US. They usually do it when services are being livestreamed. I haven't seen a single non-Jew talking about this. High holidays are coming up in a few weeks, which is when most attacks happen against our communities. We're worried, and we need people to know what's happening to us.

Why Villains Are Great

I can sum that up with one beautiful word… Versatility

For you see…

A villain can either be a someone who willingly threw away their humanity to become something monstrous…

Or they’re someone who retains their parts of their humanity, while still committing the most heinous of deeds.

They could be a demon trying to force their twisted sense of order upon everyone from atop an ivory tower…

Or just a plain bully with a soft spot that shows itself more often as time flies.

They can have the purest of intentions and cause mass suffering at the same time…

Or they are a self-righteous narcissist who sees their horrendous actions as completely justified and in the right.

Maybe they’re an ethereal, destructive, carless, and otherworldly entity…

Or a truly tragic monster.

It doesn’t matter if they’re a man…

Or a beast…

A villain can be anything or anyone, for evil has many shapes and many faces.

English added by me :)

You know in retrospect Olimar is one of the funniest Nintendo characters. He's in this fantastical space setting with alien little creatures and his little space suit....

But he's literally just a dude???

Like. He loves his wife and kids. Won't stop talking about them. He's sad he has to spend all his time at work to provide for them to the point of taking overtime.

Compare him to the rest of the smash roster. All the other space people are in this battle ships, saving the universe on purpose, or just in general, explorers or just weird little guys who travel across the galaxy for funsies.

Meanwhile as of Pikmin 4, Olimar when asked to give his expertise IMMEDIATELY assumes they want his knowledge about shipping cargo.

From his perspective the Pikmin games are hell trips that keep him away from his family and everyone else is like "Okay but the pikmin-". My man just wants to talk about his wife and how his boss keeps exploiting him stop talking to him about the weird little guys on that one oxygen planet-

I think Olimar knows what taxes are.

Most character of all time.

It actually isn't just the one crazy "herbivorize all predators" guy. There appears to be a growing movement of newfangled hyper-vegan animal rights radicals who believe that all animals suffer in nature and therefore we should just eliminate nature to save them, which they hope will be possible through biotech.

There's hundreds of them in one twitter thread alone and they can't all be trolls, some of them have careers in STEM or published writing. I don't care how impossible their idea is, this is something we're probably going to see keep growing, and their biotech utopia fantasy may be impossible, but they're already floating ideas to just plain cull predators the old fashioned way. It is not at all unbelievable that one of these freaks will eventually try to poison all the coyotes in their area with "contraceptives" or start trapping and "humanely euthanizing" raptors in one public park, and that's just the damage they can do before some idiot billionaire joins their cult.

This is probably going to be a "thing" in the years to come whether we like it or not.

☆ - ̗̀✨ He's just Ken ✨ ̖́- ☆

“Abolish Golf”

Sticker spotted in Chicago, Illinois.

A typical golf course uses 200 million gallons of water a year. There are over 16,300 golf courses in the United States.

That's nuts.

Ngl I hate golf and I'm all for this. They put a golf course in our public park at the expense of hundreds of centuries-old live oak trees. Half of the walk around the park you're just looking at an empty golf course. Like 2 people want to play golf. So annoying.

Golf was a game developed in Scotland, where it rains up to 250 days of the year, and where the courses use very hard-wearing grass. The sand in the bunkers is because it used to be played on the coast - these traditional courses are called "Links" courses. The top Links course in Scotland, Royal Dornoch, uses no mains water at all. They have their own rainwater collection system.

It wasn't originally intended to be played in the middle of a desert on lush green turf that takes thousands of gallons of water a day to maintain. Unless you can keep the course alive using only rainwater collection, it shouldn't exist.