It's dangerous to go alone, take this! ❤🐸

everybody’s always on writing prompts like “what if there was a world where everyone had a timer ticking down to their death… but you met someone whose timer said infinity!” or “what if everyone had their cause of death tattooed across their forehead… but you met someone whose forehead said THE CREATURE!” Enough -

enough. stop with the shock value. there is no need to insert THE CREATURE; the benign concept of such a world is horrifying enough. not even in urgency, but just in banal, everyday interaction. imagine you meet someone and their timer says two years. not tomorrow, not urgently soon, but two years. enough to do quite a lot. they could fall in love in that time - could they get engaged? have a baby? you might otherwise get to know them, befriend them, but perhaps you opt not to, make a conscious choice not to invest in your own grief. what balancing act would every individual person have to participate in - I have ten years, is that long enough to be a good mother to children? is that long enough to secure a caretaker for my own mother? my wife will die a few months before me. my newborn’s timer reads nineteen years.

and cause of death. you interview for a job and emblazoned across the healthy, smiling face of the HR lady is MALNUTRITION. your country is prospering, safe, but every person you meet on the street from the babies to the old women read BOMB. BOMB. what kind of havoc would fate wreak on the world? what about the loss of privacy? how would that shape our notions of hope? idk man I think a lot of those ancient poems were right, and the fates are monsters. I’m interested by the framing of these ideas as trite horror tales when the premises themselves are so much more disturbing if simply taken to their logical ends

meditations on first philosophy (1641) - rene descartes

"who give a shit"

Body swap movie where one of them has invisible disabilities and when the other one lands in their body they immediately collapse catatonic on the floor from the pain and fatigue and the first one is like 'oh damn guess I don't have to worry that I'm faking it anymore'

Okay so in my Computer Applications class we learned about conditional formatting in Excel, where you can change the color of a cell by inputting certain values.

We're supposed to use it to model heat gradients in metals, but I found a better application:

FROG ART

Toad/frog netsuke PNGs.

(1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.)

They're not naked anymore

(I attached all the refs in which they have clothes so that it would be more convenient to look for them myself) Raph already had shorts, so I won't change anything

orig refs

It's funny to me that these three were the only ones without clothes hehehehe

day 1527

Prompt 271

“Grandmother is visiting,” Damian suddenly said with no warning and with his usual not-quite demanding tone. 

“Who?” Tim wasn’t the only one to startle, seeing as Bruce had practically froze, a downturn to his lips in a silent show of confusion. 

Damian scowled. “Are you deaf Drake? Grandmother is coming to Gotham to, quote, make sure I am being properly cared for.” None of them had known that Ras was with anyone actually. At least Tim was pretty sure that would have been in the files. 

“Oh?” Dick didn’t quite crouch to Damian’s height but it was a near thing. “She-” “He,” Damian corrected, interrupting him. They all exchanged a glance before Dick continued. 

“Is he coming to the Manor or…” 

Damian scoffed again, a tiny bit of a flush against his face. “No, Grandmother will most likely be staying with Akhi-”

Now wait one moment-

“YOU HAVE ANOTHER BROTHER?!” 

They were best friends your honor

I don’t really care about Disney Princess movies because y’know, I’m almost 25, but it does make me sad that they just don’t seem to do villains anymore. Like, at all. The last good disney Princess villain was from like 2009. It makes me sad because as a young queer goth kid I loved the villains, i literally only watched the movies to see the villains. Disney villains used to slap and then they just. Stoped. Who are the weird little emo kids supposed to look up to now? The dude from Frozen who was just sort of an asshole? The lava monster from Moana who turned out to be the good guy?

Why did fun villains go out of style anyway? I would argue that some of the older bad guys are more iconic than the protagonists. Does anyone remember the plot of Sleeping Beauty or do you just remember Maleficent slaying absolute cunt? Because that’s all I remember. I had a plush Maleficent dragon. Where are the dragons now

short rest

The Dungeon Meshi crew 'leap' into action!

Bad Newts: Amphibians are in Serious Trouble

My colleagues and I have just had a paper published in Nature, based on our efforts to assess almost all amphibian species for the IUCN Red Lists. The major takeaway messages:

It is a bad time to be an amphibian

Two fifths of all amphibians are threatened with extinction.

Salamanders are the most threatened group; three fifths of all salamanders are threatened with extinction!

Climate change is a major driver of amphibian declines globally

Habitat loss, especially due to agriculture, is a problem for the vast majority of amphibians

Chytrid pandemics have caused and continue to cause catastrophic declines of both salamanders and frogs

Protected areas and careful management are working as strategies! They are actively improving the outlook of some species

As many as 222 amphibian species may have gone extinct in recent times; of those, 185 are suspected extinct but not yet confirmed.

Our paper is Open Access, you can read it here!

Photo of Atelopus hoogmoedi by Jaime Culebras, used with permission