Harpsichordical

Amazon’s super bowl ad where the Alexa mocks Chris Hemsworth for being worried about giving spy software control over his entire life. Waymo’s ad with the intro “the robots are coming!” mocking people who are rightfully extremely concerned about sharing the road with, or riding in, self-driving cars.

A lot of us were raised with the idea that “its normal for wives/children to get hit! it helps them learn– only white folk don’t get beaten when they misbehave”. That’s not true, white people aren’t the only ones who deserve a safe and abuse free environment. Black and brown people can and do have loving families. 

Female birds with confusing names.

i've been asked where/how to find early-mid 20th century images of black people to reference when drawing/writing/whatever, so i figured i'd link to my own personal resource anyone is welcome to utilize! :)

with over 900 pins and counting, this pinterest board focuses entirely on black style from the 1800s - 1970s. it’s been harder than ever to research historical fashion without running into AI, misinformation, and flat out mislabeling of different eras, so i’ve done my best to represent each period as accurately as i can.

i’ve included sections for non-caricatured art and illustration, print media, music, entertainment, styling tools, and ads. there are also sections for period pieces and more modern takes on vintage style. i did not add the 80s and 90s because there's already a wealth of imagery and information about those decades, but maybe one day :)

Almost Real's POP CULTURE issue is live on Kickstarter! Time to introduce the cute yet vaguely horrible cover critter, a living gachapon toy bioengineered by scud aliens!

The wild gachapede is a segmented worm-like arthropoid that lives parasitically inside a bivalve-like "giant diatom" in shallow, sandy-bottomed seas of the scud homeplanet. The giant diatom's shell is made of two interlocking lid-like frustules of transparent silica, allowing light to pass through to its veins of symbiotic unicellular algae. Much like the microscopic diatoms of earth, giant diatoms reproduce in two different ways, asexually and sexually. Asexual reproduction is carried out by the two frustules separating and each generating a new frustule, a phase during which they may be parasitized by the gachapede. But because the new frustule is always smaller than the old one, like the lid and body of a box, eventually one lineage of giant diatoms is too small to safely carry out asexual reproduction. These tiny ones will finally give up and reproduce sexually by releasing sperm and eggs that will join to create new larvae and maximum-size giant diatoms. The parasitic gachapede has a relatively low impact on a large healthy giant diatom, as it lays dormant until the frustules split, surviving off the "bloodstream" of unicellular algae.

Scuds have used the unique properties of these two organisms in combination with their civilization's advanced biotech to create a collectable toy; twisting the basic bodyplan of the gachapede into thousands of variations of "funny little guys." The wild diatom has been modified into a "gachapod," which is far more spacious and transparent than its wild counterpart. To obtain the toy, you crack open the two frustles and recycle the gachapod (which will now grow into two new pods). However, once removed from its food source, the gachapede typically only lives a couple days at most. At the end of its life, its cuticle calcifies and makes them into a rigid figurine. Scuds who are really into the gachapede scene will pose their gachapede into a desirable pose like a insect collector pinning a bug.

A little green buddy in the rain. Man, they look like lime candy.

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

All of the otters/ Lutrinae !