Did you guys ever hear about Prince Rupert’s Drop? The British Royal Society was really interested in these things back in the 1600s.

It’s basically a long, thin, practically snaky bit of glass that you get when you drop some molten glass into water. It solidifies into a shape like this:

The interesting and weird thing is, you can’t really break the bulb part. You can take a hammer to it but it won’t break. But the long tail is fragile and easily broken. And if you break any part of this thing, it explodes. Really, it just blows up into a million tiny little shards.

With modern high-speed cameras, they’ve managed to measure the speed of the fracture at slightly faster than one mile per second.

Peter Gelderloos

Long Term Resistance       Fighting Trump and Liberal Co-option                    

its not about how scary they are, they are/were real life animals and what matters is learning more about them, not how well they fit into your science fiction horror film lol

listen

have you ever met a swan

“Oh man, I can’t deal with birds ‘cause they’re dinosaurs and sometimes it’s like they get this glint in their eyes and they remember.”

This is a bearded vulture, or lammergeier. It’s four feet long and has a nine foot wingspan and it eats bones.

This is a shoebill stork. It dropped the duck without biting down shortly after the picture was taken, but if it had decided not to-

… it could have been the end of the road for that duck.

This is the last thing a fish sees before a macaroni penguin eats it.

This is a secretary bird in the act of demonstrating to Lord Voldemort that he came to the wrong neighborhood, ese.

This is a goose.

This is a vulture.

This is a cassowary on the attack. 

Be glad I couldn’t find the actual gif of a pelican swallowing a fish, because it’s freakin’ Lovecraftian in its HEADS SHOULD NOT BEND THAT WAY factor. You’ll have to settle for the idea of a feathered dinosaur suddenly going GLORP and devouring its victims whole just like this lady here.

Steven Spielberg didn’t create these. These are the feet of an emu.

And this is what happens when a swan (this one is named Asboy; his father was Mr. Asbo, the first swan in the UK to get named after an anti-social behavior order in ‘honor’ of his tendency to attack boaters) decides it doesn’t like you. I should probably note that this one attacked a cow.