everyone say thank you supergiant

the irony of this year's met gala theme being based on a short story about cloistered, decadently-dressed aristocracy desperately pillaging the natural resources at their disposal to hold the advancing tide of the restless underclass at bay is honestly baffling

quite literally

https://x.com/probablyreadit/status/1787608198641234138?s=46&t=kNkxEGlbDjt69LgNEB9ZBw

the girls...

bro there’s no way these are your gods you’re fucking with me

the god of Fertility, Nifih Nutsearly

Me: I read about this rare plant/animal/insect that's important for the local ecosystem and about to go extinct. It looks cool as fuck. Let's find out how to get it in my garden.

Google: oh yeah, those things are a pest. They'll ruin your beautifully manicured lawn. Here's to get rid of it. Why not buy some roundup while you're at it.

Me: >:(

Oh my goodness, the woodpecker 😆 (other two are Oriole and female Grosbeak)

I hope everyone understands, when I say “most endangered habitat on earth”, I mean temperate grasslands.

They’re more endangered than tropical rainforests, coral reefs, the arctic tundra, all of those go-to environments that get more of the spotlight.

Where I live, maybe 25% of the prairie remains in a natural state and that number is dropping. Even these fragments are mostly missing the keystone species that maintain their health, like bison, wolves, and prairie dogs. I know this is the case for other grasslands like the pampas and steppe as well. Vast lands empty of many species that used to call them home.

If you live on temperate grasslands, hold onto them tight, because they’ve been exploited like no other land and most people don’t even know how far the devastation goes.

please please pleaseeee listen to this post and learn the value of temperate grasslands. it makes me very sad that not only have these landscapes been destroyed by colonizers, but even most of the people who live there now don’t see their value. when i say i love midwestern landscapes, people call me crazy just because they’ve never seen the beauty of the tallgrass prairie :(

I had an upsetting dream last night.

For 2 days in a row I have seen this little guy removing leaves from my plant and eating them until he passes out. He's missing an ear, so he may be self-medicating his PTSD, but still, I think it's time for an intervention.

I'll let him sleep this time, but when he wakes up, we'll have a serious talk.

Found my fursona

This is what trying to get info on insects is like and it pisses me off

“Thirsty ratsnake” sounds like a roast but it can also be a guy

Fun fact about the early Catholic church is that, despite spending generations being persecuted by the Roman empire, it took less than 15 years under Theodosius I to go from “the empire is Catholic now” to “and also every other religion is banned.” You can literally read St. Augustine move from “state religious persecution is unacceptable” to “state religious persecution is cool actually” over his lifetime as Catholicism came to power. I’m sure there’s no broader lessons to be learned there

Just gonna keep pointing to the part in Asimov’s auto biography I Asimov, where he talks about antisemitism (cause it’s all really good stuff even all these years later), but I’m once again gonna just share the last 3 paragraphs cause… well you tell me they’re not relevant to this post and relevant all these years after he wrote them:

Even as I write, Jews are immigrating from the former Soviet Union into Israel. They are fleeing their country because they fear religious persecution. But the moment they set foot on Israeli soil, they become Zionist extremists who are merciless toward the Palestinians. They change from persecuted to persecutors in the blink of an eye.

That said, the Jews are not alone in this. If I’m sensitive to this particular problem, it’s because I’m Jewish myself. In fact, this phenomenon is universal. In Roman times, when the first Christians were persecuted, they pleaded for tolerance. But when Christianity prevailed, did tolerance reign? Not on your life. Instead, persecution was soon going on in the opposite direction. Or take the case of the Bulgarians, who demanded freedom from their dictatorial regime, but once they had it used it to aggress against their Turkish minority. Or the people of Azerbaijan, who demanded of the Soviet Union the freedom denied it by the central government, only to immediately attack the Armenian minority.

The Bible teaches that the victims of persecution must in no circumstances become persecutors in their turn: “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.”(Exodus 22:21). But who follows this teaching? Personally, whenever I try to spread the word, I get hostile looks and make myself unpopular….

hmmm