Because @staff is too cowardly…

Just random:

Unfortunately, I can only put 10 options, so can't put console generations.

I lent my mom a book before I read it and apparently right at the beginning they tell a true story about all our chestnut trees dying and it made my mother SO DEPRESSED that she couldn't sleep and now she's been researching chestnut trees for the past half hour looking sick

She's right!!

Chestnut trees used to define forests in the South -- some estimates say about 1/4 trees was a chestnut tree. And they were huge! Growing more than 100 feet tall (with trunks more than 10 feet in diameter), they were called the "redwoods of the East." They were a characteristic food source of the South, too. A mature chestnut tree can produce upwards of 50 lbs of nuts a year -- many of these were gathered and eaten by poor families, or turned into chestnut flour and used to make "poor man's bread."

But, at the beginning of the 20th century, a fungus called the blight was brought over from Asia. Over the next 50 years, every single American Chestnut was infected and died. While some root systems are still alive, they're considered functionally extinct.

People cut down huge areas of forest trying to prevent the spread of the blight and save the trees -- but they failed. And now several generations have never even known the chestnut tree. We don't even know enough to miss them.

But now, with advances in genetic technology, the chestnut trees may be coming back! Through a group scientific effort led by the American Chestnut Foundation, researchers have created a "transgenic American chestnut tree with enhanced blight tolerance" called Darling 58. Darling 58 is genetically modified to be able to coexist with the blight.

Darling 58 American chestnuts are currently being reviewed by the USDA-APHIS, EPA, and FDA. But researchers hope to be able to reintroduce them soon -- one huge step towards restoring our forests.

You can follow the chestnut trees' progress (and request a Darling 58 tree when they're available) at https://acf.org/ .

Thank you I'm gonna share this chestnut revitalization news with her!

Source on Twitter

The artist added this to the og post! Source: Bure Järvvitch

ao3 is down. what am i supposed to do?? continue writing my own fic??? HA you almost got me!! absolutely not. u can't fool me ao3. i'm not falling for that trick.

Welcome to my art studio

Do you need a ruler? We have two lengths: impractically long, impractically short. The rulers that are of useful length are explicitly crooked.

Looking for a pencil? This one is writes so pale you won't be sure if it has made any mark. It is completely illegible. This one is so soft that it will immediately melt, ruining the paper.

Prefer a pen? Here is a box. It leaks. The box leaks, the pens leak, but each leaks differently, depending on how you hold it. The color of inks shift. Oh, you should be wearing gloves, some of that ink is toxic.

As a matter of fact, a significant amount of the material in here is toxic and should not be touched without gloves. Are the gloves themselves toxic? No, they are just kept in a 1940s box marked "Beware Toxic Chemicals" box for aesthetic purposes. The box is probably not toxic.

Here is a chair built out of a pile of trash. It is art. Please do not sit on it. Here is a pile of trash you can use for a chair. It is sometimes taken apart to be made into art.

Please do not sit on lunch or eat the wood or look at the still life (it gets nervous).

Here is a pile of very expensive sketchbooks made from paper imported from countries that no longer exist.

These notebooks are 100 years old and are completely blank.

The sketchbook paper is of such high quality that it will accept any media applied to it, providing a key strategic advantage in the quality and efficiency of making art.

It will last forever, unchanged, displaying any piece of art created on it or with it, as intended, until physically destroyed.

These sketchbooks were gifted to me by a dying artist. I will gift them, unused, to another artist when I am dying.

Here is a pile of printer paper stolen from a corporate office I broke into with the express purpose of stealing paper and paper clips.

These crumpled, stained, torn, unsorted, half-burned papers contain my innermost thoughts, hopes, fears, they are keys to unlocking my inspiration, they are working and near final drafts of my greatest works, without them I would be lost as a human being and completely destroyed, professionally, for life.

The papers are continuously kept near permanently burning candles, various rags saturated with paint thinner, and a decades-old fan that sparks when you turn it on, turn it off, when it rains, when a loud noise is made outside, and/or every 95.12 hours.

Here is a skeleton. I will not answer questions to its authenticity. Here is a large photo album full of naked people in contorted positions.

Over there is an amour full of photographs, internet clip outs, polaroids, newspapers, books on increasingly esoteric subjects from "court room stenography" to "Rhode Island chicken culture, an eggcellent overview."

If you open the amour everything will fall out and make a loud noise (please see above fan).

If you are feeling woozy from the various paint fumes we can try to open a window. It was painted shut in 1902 but we can try to crack it with one of my twelve hammers.

you know who’s gay? paul the real estate novelist who never had time for a wife and davey who’s still in the navy and probably will be for life

New headcannon: everyone in that song is gay except the Piano Man who has no idea he’s playing at a gay bar and the staff and regulars have a betting pool on how long he’ll take to finally figure it out. So far John is ahead.

“The manager gives me a smile ‘cause he knows that it’s me they’ve been coming to see” also implies that the Piano Man is possibly an incredibly attractive but oblivious himbo, and if you listen to the rest of it imagining that, this all fits a little too well.

this makes too much sense. Also, the full quote is “Now John at the bar is a friend of mine. He gets me my drinks for free. And he’s quick with a joke or to light up your smoke. But there’s someplace that he’d rather be” Yes, your bed, he wants to be on your bed honey, that’s not a joke, he is flirting with you.

Lighting another man’s cigarette is some old-school gay cruising.

Alright.

You ready for a hard 'tag your oc' challenge?

Tag an oc who doesn't have childhood trauma. At all. Who's family is still alive.

I'll wait.

anthony bourdain:

- was an incredible chef and writer beloved by so many

- very open about his struggles with drug use and abuse as well as depression, and in testimonials from fans used to encourage people he met in their struggles to get clean 

- an outspoken and passionate advocate for the “me too” movement, to the point where he penned an essay highlighting the horrible treatment of women in the food industry and his own failings and regrets in that regard for not speaking out against it sooner

- frequently challenged western views on the countries and places he visited; one of the clearest examples i can think of was an episode of parts unknown set in iran where the highlight was the normalcy of the lives of people who live there - he went bowling with them, for example, and spent an hour calling out the bizarre westernized views of iran and it’s people as tragic, war-torn and oppressed.

- spent so much time focusing on the people in the places he visited. he ate at their homes, in their backyards, anywhere they would like him to, as much (if not more) as he did at fine dining restaurants. he was generous and kind, and the show was never about “poverty porn” but rather about showing that these are real people, with real lives just like ours, and treated them with respect and graciousness.

- was an outspoken trump-hater particularly when it came to immigration rights, discussing the impact that mexican immigrants had on his love of cooking and his desire to be a chef.

- someone asked what tony would cook for trump & kim jong un if he was asked to cater their meeting and he said “hemlock”.

- a friend of obama’s, having dined with him many times before; when someone asked if he would do the same with trump tony said: “Absolutely f—ing not. I’ve been a New Yorker most of my life… I would give the same answer that I would have given 10 years ago, when he was just as loathsome.”

in short he was a beautiful and inspirational person and i sincerely hope this side of him is remembered just as much as the tragedy of his passing.

This is legitimately my job, I string pearls 40 hours a week. I cannot help but overanalyze every piece of media that includes a pearl necklace. I have gone on long rants about Martha Wayne.

Okay, so necklaces are either knotted or straight strung. Straight strung doesn't have knots separating the pearls, so there is more tension on the pearls and it's bad for them over time, but it is cheaper and looks fine in short term. So yeah, most rich people knot their pearl necklaces. There is one exception: sometimes we have a super picky Karen-type that demands their necklace with really fucking expensive pearls be straight strung because they like the look better. Properly knotted necklaces have nearly invisible knots so this is just batshit demands, btw.

So, that leaves two options: either you chock this up to comics folks not knowing anything about pearl necklaces or, the funnier option being that Martha Wayne is just one of those people that makes the most unhinged demands to feel in control and powerful.

I'm just really pumped I found a post I could actually professionally weigh in on

@shashaforthewin you are singing my song!

I knew my partner was really in it with joining the jewelry business when they called out a strand of pearls breaking in either Batman or some other media thing we were watching. It was GLORIOUS. Because seriously no one ever understood my twitch over those things.

But it gets better.

My sweetie came up with an even better, even MOAR SAD, reason for Martha’s pearls to not have knots between them...

Sorry about your feelings.

Theron and Lana’s friendship really is one of the absolute funniest things in SWTOR. Like they started out amicably but kinda resignedly working with each other and assuming that the other was totally going to betray them at any moment, and then at some point realized they would straight up kill and die for each other without hesitation and were just like “yeah ok.” She lets him get kidnapped and tortured for The Mission and is just like “he’ll understand right? yeah totally.” He shoots at their mutual friend knowing she would throw herself in the line of fire and then derails the train they are all on for The Mission and is just like “she’ll understand right? yeah totally.” They understand each other deeply and are also so fucking done with the other’s shit. When everything goes to hell they immediately contact each other. They have canonically gotten absolutely wasted together at multiple parties. Sometimes a wookie is there.

#hilariously#the ‘they’ll understand right?’#in both occasions is 100% completely wrong#and they will never stop bringing it up just to win arguments with each other#it’s so refreshing too that it’s 100% completely platonic between them#constantly bickering like brother and sister 

preserving grey’s tags bc I 100% agree with them

being a dom is only cool if people like you. otherwise it's super embarrassing. if you're a sub you can be like "ahhh i wanna get fucked superrr hard >w<" and it's kind of endearing. if you're a dom and you say "i want to FUCK someone.. who will be mommys little KITTY today .." and no one actually wants to have sex with you, you may as well kill yourself. because there's no coming back from that

callback to the time I wrote literal pages of lore and worldbuilding, including a universe with a creation story, afterlife metaphysics, and a timeline featuring the rapture, a divine astral plane turf war, and the introduction of gods and magic to the modern mortal world

for a kink scene where I roleplayed as a sexy demon lady

I workshopped my character's name, voice and personality and wrote an entire universe to hold her. for a scene that lasted about an hour. if that's not DMing but for sex I don't know what is

your honor ive been murdered

Good news: At that level of prep I don't think it's improv anymore.

Bad news: turned on by amateur theater

Gonna plan a "Slutty Boys Party" on Nar Shaddaa's promenade on all servers where you bring one of your boys with his tits out on all servers. (This is totally not in retaliation about the companion ladies in bikinis and his having a tiff if you even suggest a slutty outfit for guys what do you mean.) (NS so it's cross faction)

I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.

To an octopus, a human is like a thinking being with blood-stained coral growing inside it.

I need to sit down and breathe into a bag for a while.

Its parts were obscenely limited in their movement. Each hinge could open or close only a small amount before reaching its limit, yet by working in concert they demonstrated unexpected dexterity, moving and manipulating the objects before it with cunning equal to my own. It was more torso than limb, as though a seal had been stretched and warped, given long grasping tentacles filled with bones like bars of coral.  It’s head was most horrid of all, flat and ovoid, jutting out too small from the trunk as though it belonged to a beast half its size.

The thing rose upon its lowermost appendages, two long trunks that ended in flat, protruding flippers that branched into stubby, grasping mockeries of a sucker. It’s triple-hinged uppermost limbs were similar, but the ends branched into five smaller tentacles, each with three hinges of their own.

I froze, as the thing’s gaze fell upon me and it opened its hideous fish-jaw, filled with thick, many-shaped teeth like white shards of stone, and spoke in a shrill, discordant babble. I felt its horrid dry grip on my flesh, as those hinged appendages closed on me like the legs of a crab.

I felt the heat of its body, tasted its noxious, oily flesh through my touch, and prepared for the end, and all went black as a swoon overtook me.

I awoke, some time later, the cold and comforting water, banished back to the comfort of the sea and the dark. I should be grateful I am alive. I should cast aside the experience like a half-remembered dream.

I shall never again go swimming in search of lights above. The last thing I recall before the darkness took me was my right eye popping free of the thing’s grasp enough to see into the distance for one brief moment.

I saw thousands of lights.

ok so it turns out “horror but it’s about something mundane from the perspective of a non-human animal” fucks severely

listen nothing in sound design will ever come close to the sheer power of the sound of a lightsaber turning on

I truly 1000% believe that Star Wars would never have gotten as popular as it has without everything about the lightsaber being absolutely perfect.

And I also believe the lightsaber is the perfect weapon in any form of media ever.

It draws upon a traditional and iconic weapon: a sword. Swords have gravitas, an ethos, that I don’t think anything else has. People love swords. They’re dramatic, they allow posing, tense back and forth battles, tests of skill and chances to flourish and show off.

But it’s better than a sword, because it sounds fucking awesome. You know what’s even better for your sword fight? If they make a cool ass noise when they hit eachother. Like everything about a lightsaber sounds amazing. It turning on, when they clash, when they deflect something, hell even when they just sit there and HUM it sounds cool.

There’s also the different colors, and this is important because it allows there to be differentiation. Vader has red, Obi-Wan has blue, Luke gets green. They’re instantly recognizable and you can understand what side someone is on based on the color of their weapon. It also allows there to be a certain amount of personalization and customization, which is VERY IMPORTANT because you know what really gets people into your story? When they start imagining themselves in it. When people start thinking about themselves in Star Wars I guarantee one of the first three questions that will come up (if not the first) is what color lightsaber would you have.

Finally, this is a small thing but, lightsabers are just easy to carry around. You just turn the damn thing off the and blade goes away. It’s a very manageable prop to carry around, and then you get sweet noises and posing when it turns on.

Laser sword goes swoosh buzz hmmmmm and it’s rad

That TCHZYOOM it makes when it ignites is fan-ficking-tastic and I ten for ten agree. 

Little known fact you get ten minutes added onto your life every time you hear the sounds of a lightsabre

“I’m reasonably cheery. I’m joining in.”

Reblog to help forward the cause of science or something, honestly I'm just curious to know how old everyone is.

oh. Oh no. You're all babies.

Come on fellow middle-agers