There's a fun pattern of people going into Dungeon Meshi thinking, "This character seems annoying and insufferable as hell. I bet I'm going to hate them, but I'll stick around to see why other people seem to think they are such a big deal." Then as the story unfolds, they realize, "Knowing how they connect to the world, I completely understand why they behave this way. This character is actually really cool."

A new character appears and people are like, "THIS character will definitely be annoying and insufferable as hell. I bet they are super overrated. Can't wait for their part to end so I can go back to watching my faves." Then as the story unfolds, they realize, "Knowing how they connect to the world, I completely understand why they behave this way. This character is actually really cool."

And then another character appears and people like, "Ok, this character is annoying and insufferable as hell for real. I actually hate this one this time. I hope they never show up again." I wonder when people will realize that the writing in Dungeon Meshi is not so mean-spirited as to have characters that solely exist to be gleefully and disposably hated by the audience.

Porcelain Crab, Petrolisthes violaceus, family Porcellanidae, coast of Chile

Photograph by matias_saa

i have been constantly in tears over this newly hatched duck i found on instagram last night

A pike jumped out of the water likely chasing prey and got stuck in a branch and died. Now, a bird has made a nest in its mouth. One of the most interesting things I’ve seen.

Just a reminder that while prehistoric fish are cool, there are plenty of neat babies still around!

Facts About Tiny Shitty Artillery Slug Men I Just Made Up

The term "tiny shitty artillery slug men" originates from a commander furious that the defence budget was being wasted on these pathetic, gruesome little beings instead of towering, glorious supersoldiers produced by enemy factions. Tiny shitty artillery slug men have adopted this term as a point of pride and the community at large refuses to be called anything else.

Tiny shitty artillery slug men are sterile and are produced by infecting standard human embryos with mutagenic virus. Humans in or near facilities producing tiny shitty artillery slug men must constantly take antivirals because if you get pregnant while infected with mutagenic virus, your fetus will develop into a tiny shitty artillery slug man. Sometimes mistakes or disasters happen and tiny shitty artillery slug men are born into the general population. With changing social norms, in most places this isn't that big of a deal.

This mutagenic virus strain was once used as a biological terror weapon, but has since fallen out of use, because any faction making use of mutagenic virus in this way dooms itself to complete annihilation by artillery in 10 or 20 years.

Space, facilities, and resources needed to house 5 standard human artillery crew can easily house 100 tiny shitty artillery slug men.

Tiny shitty artillery slug men are the easiest supersoldier to "pirate" and mass produce, but are very difficult to integrate with existing forces.

Tiny shitty artillery slug men don't live as long as standard humans. Their ageing process is not well understood since they started existing very recently, but the longest a tiny shitty artillery slug man has ever lived was 53 years.

Because tiny shitty artillery slug men are often housed in large groups and removed from the most traumatic forms of warfare, they generally have much better social skills than other supersoldiers.

Tiny shitty artillery men generally have a much easier time integrating with civilian society than other supersoldiers, partially due to their sociability and also because their strong sense of smell and instinctive understanding of how things fall are widely applicable in all kinds of jobs.

Thought experiment: an incredibly uncool non-aspirational supersoldier deliberately made smaller, weaker, and more annoying than the average human, but is still the most effective supersoldier type in their universe. The tiny shitty artillery slug man is based on the anatomy of ambush predator caterpillars.

Thought experiment: an incredibly uncool non-aspirational supersoldier deliberately made smaller, weaker, and more annoying than the average human, but is still the most effective supersoldier type in their universe. The tiny shitty artillery slug man is based on the anatomy of ambush predator caterpillars.

THEY'A TRIMMED THE HERBS!

Source

About twice a month, someone new likes every single post I made about Wat Tambor and doesn’t reblog anything. This is totally justifiable because sometimes I don’t want my own posts on my blog.

The Collectors Weekly antique enthusiast website got a sleek modern new update. In the process, all old comments on articles were deleted. Although this is another ember in the ever-burning library, I think at least a few good things came out of it because old Collectors Weekly comment sections were among the most viciously toxic places on the internet.

The background miasma of classist elitism combined with what seemed like at least 20% of users solely there for Nazi memorabilia needs no elaboration, but there were two specific comment section arguments that were so bad I still remember them.

There was an article by a man who travelled the world to collect gorgeously ornate opium smoking paraphernalia who became so dedicated to recreating the long-forgotten uses of his cryptic intricate little devices that he became addicted to opium and destroyed his health. In the comments, someone said something along the lines of, "You ruined your life for nothing. You have done no original research. You have contributed nothing to collective human knowledge. There is extensive research already being done on the pharmacological effects of specific opiates on receptors. It is insulting that you believe your research is at all worth reading." And then people started dogpiling this person like, "You missed the entire point of the article. It's not just about the medical effects of opium, it's about the emotional addiction of smoking surrounded by beautiful objects in a luxurious lounge and the feeling of uncovering something old and forgotten. It's funny how you say the author contributed no knowledge, but I learned a lot about history and culture from this article, things it seems you have no concept of." And then the first person was like, "I am a licensed pharmacologist currently doing PhD research on antibody binding patterns. The state of knowledge here is so tragic that you don't know how much you don't know." And then people were like, "What do antibodies have to do with anything in the article? It sounds like you're just here to brag about your degree. It doesn't matter how much you know about medicine. This article isn't about that." It went on for hundreds of comments with the first poster flatly refusing to accept that any non-medical-researcher had anything to contribute, or that cultural studies had any worth to human society. I think I stopped reading when someone said the first poster deserved to get murdered by an opiate addict robbing their pharmacy. There was an article featuring an interview with a lady who had a website where she experimentally recreated those insanely shitass 50s recipes created by advertisers to sell as much mayo and shortening as humanly possible. The entire comments section was filled with, "You mean like Lileks Gallery of Regrettable Food?" "James Lileks did it first." "Lileks ripoff. Read the original" with the occasional "All Lileks does is curate and commentate ads. She actually makes and eats these recipes." Apparently a vast majority of this article's audience read the title and first few words and then the compulsion to castigate a stupid, lazy, lying, pretentious, self-aggrandising, unskilled, over-praised WOMAN was so powerful that all their brains shut down before they could visually parse the modern real life photos of these foods and realise James Lileks doesn't have a full monopoly on discussing this era of American history online. Some commenters went on her website, where you'd think seeing actual step-by-step photos of these recipes and taste tester reactions would get it through their heads that she and Lileks were in fact doing very different things, but they continued calling her a lazy ripoff on her own site.

a herd of oribatid mites thunders across the green plain of a watermelon rind

they are this big —> .

Pūkeko - 2020

The edges of an overstuffed manila folder are steadily pockmarked from the sweaty, shifting fingers of nervous recent Harvard graduate stumbling down the labyrinthian halls of a ludicrously well-funded USA think tank whose sole purpose is to generate contingency plans for when any possible combination of heads of state marry one another. If he plays his cards right, he can seize a prized position in this institution with a potentially earthshattering new postulate: polygamy.

The same way Wat Tambor knew Darth Plagueis and Darth Sidious were the same people as Hego Damask and Sheev Palpatine, but didn't see this as important or bother to tell anyone because it doesn't affect his personal goals, I think it would be really funny if Jul Tambor knew Darth Vader was the same person as Anakin Skywalker, but also didn't see this as important or bother to tell anyone because it doesn't affect his personal goals.