And stories shall become legends.

Birth of Venus 🩵✨

One of the rare instances a school assignment actually turns out good

if the heavens ever did squeak, she's the last true mouse piece

Willow Ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus), in transitional plumage, family Phasianidae, Alaska

photograph by Kristina Ellis

How it feels watching this show sometimes

using "what were YOU doing at the devils sacrament" to mean "yeah i made an embarrassing reference but you understood it which is also embarrassing" is very funny to me

my favorite part is that absolutely nobody says this except here. so if you use it in public, it's a dead giveaway that you spent the last ten years on tumblr. but then again, they recognized it, which means they were at the devil's sacrament

Feelings tonight

“We are here, and this is now.” Constable Visit, a strict believer in the Omnian religion, occasionally quoted that from their holy book. Vimes understood it to mean, in less exalted copper speak, that you have to do the job that is in front of you.

--Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

"It shouldn't be like this."

"There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do."

--Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

There's just what happens, and what we do.

Happy place

Too small, too powerful

US Elevation.

by @cstats1

man the Appalachian mountains really aren’t shit huh

The Rockies are new, young and virile and fresh from the Laramide orogeny, tall and lanky teenagers on the geological scale. the Appalachian mountains are old, formed hundreds of millions of years ago before dinosaurs walked the Earth. They are ancients, elders, witnesses to half a billion years of life coming and going. To be tall is not a virtue. To be small is not a sin. The Appalachians are eroding under the weight of time, slowly shrinking and returning to the Earth from which they sprang. Appreciate them while they are still here.

I do want to say real quick again about the age of the Appalachians…

They said “before dinosaurs,” but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.

There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.

That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.

The mountains aren’t older than dinosaurs. They are older than bones.

see that little lump up at the top of minnesota? the sawtooth mountains? so small most places would just call them hills?

those are over a billion years old.

that’s why they’re so small. they’re the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didn’t kill any dinosaurs. or any fish. or any animals at all. because there were no animals. you know what there was?

algae.

those mountains were 5 miles tall when the most advanced life on earth was algae.

so i’m just gonna go ahead and keep calling them mountains, even though all you need to climb them is hiking shoes and a nice afternoon. because a place where you can crouch down and touch basalt that was lava before leaves were invented deserves some respect.

The earth is unfathomably ancient, and you garner no love from her when you insult her eldest children.

not only that, the Appalachians predate the Atlantic Ocean and were fragmented. they stretch across three continents, as Atlas in Africa and Caledonians in Europe as you can see here:

the Appalachians are way way old. the fossils that ARE found in these ranges are ancient marine beings, whose fossil remains predate the anatomical structures of beings migrating to land for the first time. THAT’S how old the Appalachians are.

show the elders some respect, they have witnessed eons and are returning to the land from which they grew, it’s the kind of the passage of time on a scale that our human lives could not even begin to comprehend.

“PBJ & Jar of Milk” me, oil, 2022

It completely blows my mind we still have oil painters. It feels like the height of luxury to have the joys of impressionism, modern art movements, and then people doing this the same as they ever were, making paintings that could be taken out of an art history textbook if you forget for a moment that mason jars might not have looked exactly like that

obsessed with this sweet commission I wrapped up this week... look closely lol

Karen Boylan (American,b.1946)

Cat nap, 2004

Oil