the stone marten sounds like a completely fictional problem

like when other hemerophiles become pests, the damage they do is completely understandable. what does a wild animal want? food, shelter, a safe place to raise its young. simple, right? a raccoon moves into your attic because it's dry and warm, and he leaves feces and remains of prey because he's a raccoon and doesn't know that's not appropriate roommate behavior. obviously blackbirds steal your cherries and voles eat your veggies! they're hungry little guys! you would do this too if you were a blackbird or a vole.

the stone marten, though, will wreck your car. for no apparent reason. he's not living there and he doesn't want to eat the rubber from your brake line. he just fucks up your engine for the lolz. and he's sneaky about it, too! the damage will often not become apparent until it's catastrophic. until very suddenly your converter is fucked, your transmission hands in notice, or your brakes fail in the middle of a busy intersection.

somehow, over millions of years, nature evolved this animal who's body size, behaviour, and territorial aggression all work together in the precise way that makes him very effective at sabotaging one of the biggest pollutants in modern society.

it's so normalized we never stop to think how ridiculous it is to have your car destroyed by a cute little mustelid who doesn't understand mechanics and just wants to tell his rival to get fucked. sounds like something a mediocre author would put in an allegory about environmentalism, and get marked in red by the editor with the note A little on the nose, don't you think.

this guy's an ecoterrorist. he does almost 100 million € damage each year in germany alone.

take good pics for the rest of us! (and please wear proper eclipse glasses!!)

YORK CAN READ?? (NOT CLICKBAIT!!)

Bonus:

Quick PSA, if you get one of those "Work scanned, AI use detected" comments on AO3, just mark them as spam.

Some moron apparently built a bot to annoy or prank hundreds of authors.

There is no scanning process, your work doesn't actually resemble AI writing, it's all bullshit. Mark the comment as spam (on AO3, not the email notification you got about the comment!) and don't let it get to you.

Have you ever seen “hair ice?”  “Hair ice” or “bearded frost” is rare and occurs only in a small percentage of the world (it’s not Hoar Frost). Hair Ice grows specifically on the decaying wood of an Alder tree branch & is caused by a fungus living within decaying wood. The fungus “breathes” or releases its spores pushing the moisture out of the wood’s pores, causing it to immediately freeze. The small hole is as thin as a strand of hair thereby causing the hair-like ice to form.

Image - Matt Nichols

it’s always “let aang swear” or “let zuko swear” but y’all are missing out on the comedic potential of katara being the one who has the dirtiest mouth. she swears like a sailor but is just better at hiding it than everyone else because she doesn't want to influence aang or toph, and tries to keep up pretenses of being proper.

after all the time they spent fighting each other as enemies and sparring as friends, zuko’s the only one that knows this about her but no one believes him.

(for those who question where katara could possibly learn to curse, i ask - have you ever assisted women through childbirth in a world where epidurals don't exist? katara has. like c'mon. she knows all the swear words).

Me: Zuko's scar is kind of shaped like a flame.

Me: I mean, no shit, it's a burn scar.

Me: But it has the three little pointy bits at the back, which kind of make it look like the Fire Nation's flame emblem, but turned sideways.

Me: ...

Me, scribbling furiously: The resistance movement in the Fire Nation comes to see Zuko as the symbolic leader of their movement toward the end of the war, and because voicing support for the traitor prince isn't tolerated, the resistance needs a subtler way to make their position known. All across the Fire Nation, banners are stolen and re-hung sideways, official seals on documents are deliberately printed crooked, and disillusioned soldiers deface their uniforms by tearing the flame emblems away and reattaching them sideways. What most people know but no one will say is that the sideways flames represent Zuko's scar, and that the symbol indicates support for him as a leader and for his mission to bring an end to the war.

Me: ...

Me: Am I gonna have to start another fic just for this idea?

Happy "Germany picked the funniest date to kinda legalize weed" day

Okay, while I strongly dislike Ty Lee joining the Kyoshi Warriors as a resolution to the "matched set" issue brought up on Ember Island,

I do think it works really well for an implied "offscreen redemption", because Ty Lee was involved in the capture of said warriors. Like the Gaang with Zuko, they wouldn't immediately accept her after that, so she must have somehow made amends for them to let her join.

And as a Kyoshi Warrior, Ty Lee can continue to help the people of the Earth Kingdom, the people most hurt by what she helped Azula do* and work for her redemption.

(* Though we shouldn't forget that Ty Lee was coerced into helping Azula in the first place.)

AU where Sokka’s high-on-cactus-juice encounter with the giant mushroom takes a dark turn. (Also he has a gun)

based on this beautiful tumblr post

bonus:

et tu, mblr?

tumblr-Nutzer an den Iden des März

Gotta think of a name for my New PC. :)

NEEEEEEEIN

Zutara Month 2024

It’s that time of year again, folks! This year, it will once again be hosted in May. Next year, we will return to April, but we waited until the end of February this year to announce because of the live-action, so old and new fans would have the chance to participate. I’m glad we did because I’m pretty sure “scarf” will be a prompt this year.

We will be posting the first Google form at around 5 pm PST, where you will be able to type out prompt suggestions.

The form will close after two weeks, after which the voting for each submitted prompt in the first round will occur.