Meeting of the Minds in the Outer Banks.

don tingle

Just watched the banned Moon Girl episode.

>the episode addresses the topic of trans kids in sports >the entire episode is about how bigots will always move the goalpost, and playing by their rules is pointless >the solution is not to play their game and break the rules >it also states that trans people should never feel like a burden >the character Brooklyn is explicitly stated to be trans >there is also an explicitly nonbinary character >multiple mentions of pride and depictions of pride flags, trans flags and progress flags

I'm not at all surprised this didn't get past the censors but I'm so mad that it didn't, because this could've been something really special, and the fact it was canned after being fully finished is downright painful. This episode was wonderful and I'm grateful to all the people who worked on it, and angry that their hard work was wasted. Disney did not deserve you.

Here's a link, as long as Disney doesn't take it down

Reminder that twitter is now an informal, unregulated (i.e. warrantless) information source for Trump administration use.

Crow's Nest

Can you believe these liches love each other? Ridiculous

This is sorta based off that post by @kravkalackin (that I had to hunt down), because these idiots would act like they’re falling in love for the first time for like, the 50th time

Edit: Okay I’m more alert and able to get the ID together :0

[ID: A four page comic featuring two liches in the form of red-robed spectres with shadowed faces, (save for their eyes) and skeletal appendages. In the first image, one lich loomed over a body that looked like it has a fatal wound. He rubs a “hand” on his “forehead” and says, “aw beans.” The second lich witness this from the background. She is still for a moment, be for bursting into a fit of laugher. The first lich, still focused on the body, say “that’s not—” but then he stops and stares over at her, distracted by her laughter. He beings to float over to her, laughing a little as she tries, and fails, to temper down her own giggles. The tips of their hands touch, and they lean into each other, gazing happily into each others eyes. End ID]

The steppe mammoth coin from my Ice Age Giants coin collection, from the The Royal Mint and the Natural History Museum, London, is available now! View and buy them here: https://www.royalmint.com/

Data is the supportive friend everyone needs.

“I’m gonna text my ex.” Data:

Weeping at this. Frighteningly similar to how I sound

I wonder how many of y'all have heard of prisencolinensinainciusol

Never heard of it. Please tell me more

There is not a single word in this song. There is no language or listener to whom it makes sense.

The context behind this song is amazing. Basically, at the time Italy was going through a big interest in American rock-and-roll music (sort of like a Kpop craze).

Enter Adriano Celentano: a top Italian rockstar. Effortlessly talented, deservedly popular, and extremely funny. Celentano decides to use his talent for evil. He composes a kind of a parody: a song that mimics English but is entirely gobbledegook, improvised to such an earworm you will find yourself humming it while doing laundry 5 years from now.

He performs it on Italian TV. It's an instant hit. Tops all the charts in Italy. And France. And Germany. And Belgium. Everyone goes nuts. It's a great comedy of American rock-and-roll. And of music itself.

Meet the Mona Lisa of the Prado, the earliest known copy of Da Vinci’s best portrait. Similarity in the undersketch of the painting indicates that this was very likely painted concurrently with the original Mona Lisa, by a student of Da Vinci.

There is much controversy in the art world over the question of whether or not to clean the fragile Mona Lisa, but her sister has been restored and some fairly odd later alterations removed to show the original vibrant colors and lighting. Some details, such as the sheerness of her shawl and the pattern on the neckline of her dress, have become utterly obscured in the original, but in the restored copy they’re perfectly clear.

It blows my mind a little bit to look at these two sisters side-by-side and imagine how much vivid detail could be hiding in the Mona Lisa under 500 years of rotten varnish. 

THE COPY HAS EYEBROWS

Your response to a beautiful piece of artwork done by Leonardo Da Vinci himself is “SHES GOT EYEBROWS”. Alright. All intelligent life has been lost.

Yo Snooty McSnotwhine, the Mona Lisa’s vanished eyebrows have been the subject of debate and analysis in the art expert community for hundreds of years, long before your parents squirted water at each other from across the clown car and then honked their bicycle horns to indicate they really wanted to make a smug, insufferable little clown baby together. 

this continues to be the best reply to a criticizing comment on this site

It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.

In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.

Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.

The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.

When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.

It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.

That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.

I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?

That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.

You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.

The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.

Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.

But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.

Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.

Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.

And where does that silt come from?

Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.

The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.

You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.

All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.

Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.

it’s monday i’m in the labyrinth

it’s tuesday i’m in the evil lab

it’s wednesday i’m in the time loop

it’s thursday i’m in the medieval torture apparatus

🌸it’s friday i’m in love🌸

#I don't care for Monday's maze #Tuesday Wednesday time-loop haze #Thursday in the rack's embrace #It's Friday I'm in love (via @hartshorn-and-isinglass)

drew myself as a lungfish and AAAUUGGHHGHG this both has my actual vibes and is so gender ngl

[ID: art of an anthropomorphic lungfish done in a sketchy realistic art style with desaturated colors. The lungfish is standing with a hand on their hip and looking at something off screen. They are fat and have a brown body with a white belly, neck and jaw, and have an enormous tail. They are wearing round glasses, a red choker with gold spikes and a matching bracelet, a necklace, a cropped brown tank top, and ripped jeans with a red belt. End of ID.]

Holy fucking shit of all the possibilities I did not see that one coming.

X

X

"im sorry to tell you but this is unfortunately fetish art :( " you’re a coward and a fool. tell me what about eroticism makes it lose value as a piece of art. tell me in what way is lust a less worthy feeling to be depicted in art than anger or joy or sadness or any other human emotion. why did you like it before and why do you not like it now? what changed? why does it upset you? what makes it bad now, what makes it gross, what makes it wrong? do you reject what you dont understand? do you let your gut reaction dictate what you deem bad? what you deem immoral? whats allowed to exist and what isnt?