here is temporarily who I am

Hedgehog-shaped jar, Neolithic period (3500-3000 BCE)

Courtesy Alain Truong

Alain Truong, who indicates that this is held in the Collection of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute.

While trying to track down a source for this, I found More Ceramic Hedgehogs.

Faience (tin-glazed pottery), Middle Kingdom, 12th Dynasty (Egypt) (c. 1938 - 1755 BCE) (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Fired clay, New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty (Egypt) (c. 1539 - 1292 BCE) (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

This one alas I found on an auction site. Alabaster rather than ceramic, but still extremely good i feel!!! Described as "Third millenium BC[E]".

And may I also commend to your attention: an Archaeology Now blog post on this important topic

I drew a bunch of different kind of pumpkins :D 

turning of the leaves

The infamous puppy debacle of '94

The ink bottle lying on your desk... begins to crawl away..???

الطبيعة و الحياة

The razorbill, razor-billed auk, or lesser auk (Alca torda) is a North Atlantic colonial seabird and the only extant member of the genus Alca of the family Alcidae, the auks. It is the closest living relative of the extinct great auk (Pinguinus impennis).

breaking news! new beautiful photo of the best species of frog in the world just dropped

cochranella euknemos, 📸 nuqui_herping on instagram

Hey all!

I've been absent for a little while, as you may have noticed, and one of the things that's been going on is this: we are trying to get together a fund to make sure our friend @mythopoetry can use the next six months to finish getting desperately needed diagnoses, her citizenship, and further medical care, which for her means she needs to be able to rent a room in Ottawa.

Rika's fuller story is at the link but the short version is: Rika has survived and escaped truly shitty circumstances including an abusive family and then an abusive marriage and we (the group of us who care about her) are working on the long-term goal of helping her get to a place of long-term safety and security. Rika is a fellow fan (her poison being mostly SPN) and original writer, an artist, and has put her body through the absolute wars having previously to do full-time work despite several untreated disabilities.

We are just starting to get the care and help she needs as she needs it, but as y'all surely know, referrals and diagnoses and treatments all take time, and it's become very clear that among other things she needs to be able to reside in Ottawa in order to access the treatment and services there as the travel between Ottawa and the community she's currently got a place to stay in has become unviable.

Realtalk: Rika is important to me, and most of all Rika deserves to have the chance to get the medical care she needs, to apply for the provincial support she needs, and to have the time to recover from all the shit this world has previously put her through. I can vouch for her going back more than two decades, and any help, be it a few dollars or a signal boost, would go a long way.

Thanks, guys, if you can. <3

PSA if you are Canadian and wish to do interac etransfer, I am entirely comfortable with lobbing my email address here: liza(dot)f(dot)waters(at)gmail(dot)com.

Hey all!

We are still plugging away towards goal: Rika's girlfriend has been able to visit and to help move her stuff over to the new roomshare, which is fantastic. Rika's also had a couple follow up refer-on appointments and last I heard had not managed to injure herself by secretly trying to get a bunch of moving stuff done before anyone could actually help with the things she's best avoiding doing for her health.

We are all incredibly proud of her.

Thank you to everyone who has donated even the smallest bit, and to everyone who's even just reblogged - it means a lot. I would love to get us a few steps further before the end of this month if at all possible. <3

Update from official page:

Hey lovelies!

As noted in our previous update, Rika got a few donations via etransfer or paypal, so I've edited down our goal here by that amount just to make sure our progress is correctly shown.

That means we're not quite 2/3 of the way there, which is amazing - thank you all so much for your help.

Edit: Huh! I had a bit here about the breakdown and so on of what the funding was for, but somehow it got eaten in the update.

A shorter version:

Our goal as noted before is to cover the next six months of . . .

Our intent and hope is to get a number of these into a position of being eased by the supports that should be available to people with Rika's disabilities . . . but as anyone knows who has had to do it themselves, that takes time: applications take time to be answered, and you can't begin the application until you have documentation, and you can't get the documentation until you have a PCP and that's a Quest in and of itself.

Things are plugging along and with everyone's help we have an excellent chance of getting these things sorted. So thank you very much for that!

incredibly dense labyrinth topiary of boxwood in the cloistered garden of the former Monastery (then a palace, now a hotel) of Pazo de San Lorenzo de Trasouto, in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

via

400 year old abandoned maze in Spain.

Hey all!

I've been absent for a little while, as you may have noticed, and one of the things that's been going on is this: we are trying to get together a fund to make sure our friend @mythopoetry can use the next six months to finish getting desperately needed diagnoses, her citizenship, and further medical care, which for her means she needs to be able to rent a room in Ottawa.

Rika's fuller story is at the link but the short version is: Rika has survived and escaped truly shitty circumstances including an abusive family and then an abusive marriage and we (the group of us who care about her) are working on the long-term goal of helping her get to a place of long-term safety and security. Rika is a fellow fan (her poison being mostly SPN) and original writer, an artist, and has put her body through the absolute wars having previously to do full-time work despite several untreated disabilities.

We are just starting to get the care and help she needs as she needs it, but as y'all surely know, referrals and diagnoses and treatments all take time, and it's become very clear that among other things she needs to be able to reside in Ottawa in order to access the treatment and services there as the travel between Ottawa and the community she's currently got a place to stay in has become unviable.

Realtalk: Rika is important to me, and most of all Rika deserves to have the chance to get the medical care she needs, to apply for the provincial support she needs, and to have the time to recover from all the shit this world has previously put her through. I can vouch for her going back more than two decades, and any help, be it a few dollars or a signal boost, would go a long way.

Thanks, guys, if you can. <3

hi. i'm the bee. it's me. the bee is me. the last 6 months has been the longest amount of time in my entire life i've gone without something weirdly traumatic happening. like, i mean! one time i quit a job where i was asked to use a feeding tube on a premature infant during the height of covid (well no, FIRST i tried walking into traffic, THEN i quit); that morning my last grandparent died and i got to my last day on the job late because, well, you know. that was a friday. on monday i went to work at my new job! when i got home that night my siblings called and told me our dad had shot his eye out! oh well. on tuesday morning, as usual, i went back to work. that was, by far, not the worst thing i ever shrugged and went to work over in the morning. i think you can basically shrug off any amount of horror until the very second that you cannot.

i ended up in ontario because i called feather from a hospital parking lot, because a medical appointment for testing re: unrelenting pain (which is getting better!), an appointment i had waited 2 years for, had said "eh there's nothing we can do about this" and offered no other options other than "maybe quit your job?", and feather's response to me asking her politely if she would find care for my cat after i killed myself was, "orrrr hey maybe you and the cat can just go to ontario instead!" oh yeah, the cat. one time my cat got shot, also. well, my dad shot my cat, specifically. that was more traumatic for him than me i reckon. he's fine. ftr. my cat i mean. and my eyeless dad, he's like. basically fine. if you really want something weird you can ask me about what happened the year my mom died. ask me about the coffee, for that matter. ask me about the first time i heard the words, "don't tell anyone about this. they won't understand." anyway, the point is, i've spent 6 months safe and quiet and cared for and as of the last like. few weeks i'm finally realizing weird new things about like. love! and empathy! and like, my body is a real place i have to live in and maybe that will be tolerable one day with enough disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs! i don't know if all the nice things feather says about me are true, i don't know what's going to happen next (i mean i have some pretty good ideas actually, and they all seem like really nice things), but i know it's taken some INSANELY heroic efforts and a CONSTANT and vast amount of love from all my friends poured into me to get me here, and i would very much like to stay alive now. just need a little more time to gather myself.

I keep telling her that she should write up all kinds of stories about her life and put up a Patreon for people to laugh in that horrified “hahaha wait what the FUCK” way because there’s so much what the fuck.

And no matter what happens we are GOING to make things okay.

We could just very much use some help, and even a few dollars is something. It all adds up.

2 color varieties of the Land Snail, Helicina viridis, family Helicinidae, Dominican Republic

photographs by Carlos De Soto Molinari

rainbow tripod fish larva (bathypterois grallator) | source

lots of african peach moths (egybolis vaillantina) | source