Great-Eared Nightjar aka the ‘baby Dragon’ bird Appreciation Post 🐉 🐥
📷 credit: Live Science

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Great-Eared Nightjar aka the ‘baby Dragon’ bird Appreciation Post 🐉 🐥
📷 credit: Live Science

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extremely funny when students get really into some harmless "vintage" activity to the point of absurdity. right now it's hacky sack, which is not something i ever thought i would see my students playing en masse. and yet here they are organizing competitive hacky sack teams. taking over any space they can to kick a hacky sack around. i had to chase a group to morning assembly today because they were busy playing hacky sack. just saw one of my students sending an email that said "stop adding randos to our team they're the worst sackers." 2026 year of the hacky sack ig
i went to the dentist today and my dentist honest to god said “can i ask you a question…….what the hell is in your mouth”
it was in awe lmao
then the hygienist and assistant all came over to look too and they were like “wooooow” and my ass was sitting there like
oh my god i posted this and then went to work, and
story time
okay so to preface this, my hometown where i’m originally from is a really fucking weird place. like from the outside it seems like a normal suburban town, but once you’re there for awhile you get the feeling that’s something’s not…quite all together. a lot of people are really fucking weird there — so much so that that was a running joke in school growing up, that people in the town were just like that. everyone knew not to go out to the farm lands surrounding the town especially at night, we called it “the cuts” and people used to disappear out there all the time or get shot at by the especially weird people that would live out there. the news was and still is truly a thing of horror. every time i come back i’m regaled with even more stories of crazy shit that has happened there.
to put it in perspective we generally never had “normal crime” like robbery or anything like that when i lived there, though that did happen sometimes. the news stories were always like, “a kid was kidnapped by local residents and tortured in a house around the corner,” “a random person was chased down and shot for sport in a really nice neighborhood,” “someone was gored to death by a bull while out car shopping,” etc. (these are all real, btw). everyone does drugs and the whole town is located really close to a government site where they test nuclear weapons and chemicals and shit. this is how i grew up, in this bizarre environment.
i need to preface it this way so that you get that it’s weird. it’s a fucking weird place. i used to listen to the welcome to night vale podcast and make comparisons from it to my hometown, that’s how weird it is.
i only say this so you know that this town is where i got my orthodontics from.
all the kids in my town went to this one particular orthodontist. i also used to go to a dentist in town that a lot of people went to as well. i had a permanent retainer put on my bottom teeth after braces and no one had ever said anything to me about the model of retainer itself or it being weird type of retainer at all. i saw a ton of other people (mostly other kids that were my age at the time) that had the same type of retainer as me too so i never thought about it.
so i kept my retainer in — it’s never caused me problems and it keeps my teeth straight, why not?
however i went to a dentist for the first time in a metropolitan area now, and when he saw it in my mouth his literal first reaction was to say “uh can i ask you a question….what the hell is that”
LITERALLY the words that he said
which in hindsight makes almost too much sense. of course my town of all towns would put these weird unnecessary contraptions in kids’ mouths, and of course it happened so much that everyone just thought it was normal. that sounds exactly, to a T, like my hometown.
my permanent bottom retainer is apparently this prototype that is so rare that he’s literally never seen it before in his life, not in dental school, nowhere. it’s not that it’s an outdated type, it’s just rare as fuck. they were still staring at pictures of it on my chart in wonder when i left the office.
so just know somewhere out there, in a weird ass suburban town where they test nuclear weapons and a good portion of the residents go fucking nuts, there’s probably hundreds of people still walking around with this same contraption in their mouth that exists nowhere else in the world thinking, “yeah, that’s cool. that makes sense. let me go drink the definitely not-contaminated water now and never move away from here.”
This sounds like an X-files episode
Okay, so I looked into it and I think that the town is Tracy, California.
I looked up the bull-murder thing OP mentioned and Tracy seemed to be only town that came up with a matching case. Though the man didn’t actually die from his injuries everything else matches up one for one. So just to make sure that it was the right town I looked to see if there was any murder-torture of young people in Tracy, and unfortunately there was. It was a 17 year old boy who escaped and survived the torture. And just to solidify that it was in fact Tracy I looked up shootings in residential areas and there was one of a 20 year old man who was shot and killed in a nice neighborhood.
Okay, but I decided to look into Tracy more to find out more information about it and the town is super suspicious. There’s been a lot of murders and shooting in the town. Back in 2009 an 8 year old girl, Sandra Cantu, was kidnapped and murdered by a Sunday school teacher who said she had no idea why she killed Sandra. Another case happened in 2018 when four underage boys were shot and one was killed by four teenage boys. There’s a lot of news stories on shootings, homicides, and drug busts in that town. It’s a really cute town from the outside, if you just look up Tracy, California there’s a lot of really cute businesses and nice articles on sweet things that happen in the town, but if you actually look into it the town is really sketchy.
So yeah, this sketchy town with a military base, multiple homicides and shootings is maybe Tracy, California.
………………..yeah, you guys caught me
i grew up in tracy
also i have to add another person’s tags to this since it’s honesty hour because they’re hilarious and true
Honestly I wasn’t even surprised when I found out it was in California. Even less surprised when googled it and found out it was near the Bay Area. That sounds about right.
Apparently the motto is “Think Inside the Triangle” and I’m not sure how to feel about that.
Im rebolgging just to add that it’s illegal to see the news from the city in UE. Like, LITERALLY:
it’s….what now
There's some kind of civil war going on on the cookie run kingdom discord right now because they banned selfcest on the grounds that it's "like incest" which is really funny to me because I was on the cookie run ovenbreak discord for like 5 minutes and genuinely everyone on there is 9 years old and just spamming random letters in chat
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.
Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?
"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"
Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?
"No, why would it?"
One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:
"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.
"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?
“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.
"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.
"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.
"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."
#ngl survival module sounds fun as fuck. maybe i gotta torture my current group a bit (via @nadaismus)
It's worth bearing in mind that tournament-style survival mode developed in the context of a version of D&D where you can create a new character and hit the ground knowing everything you need to know to effectively play them in just a couple of minutes. 5E isn't structurally terribly well-suited for the binder-full-of-backup-PCs approach, and it's definitely a recipe for disaster in 3E or Pathfinder unless your entire group consists of a very particular flavour of high-effort masochists.

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The lack of agreement across brands on what “extra firm tofu” is is, in fact, very high on my list of unimportant problems.
Several years back “extra firm” still had high water content and needed to be diligently pressed and pan fried with care if you wanted to achieve crispy.
And then I guess tofu had a moment and brands got scared of losing people to trial-and-error and started manufacturing extra-firm tofu you could use to break a window and escape a house fire with.
And the more Americanized brands went that direction while the traditional brands said “no that’s fucking stupid we’re not changing anything” and SOME brands said “what if we do like the middle of that?”
Buying tofu is now in fact a vibe-check game of assessing a brand’s packaging and gauging what YOU think they mean by “extra firm”
It’s actually worse in fact because you need to play the vibe-check game twice on account of the recipe will inevitably call for some kind of “extra firm” and you need to know ITS vibes.
Asking you to grate the tofu on a cheese grater and bake it? Westernized. You want that red brick tofu. You want Whole Foods amount of extra firm or SUPER firm because if that thing has any amount of moisture left in it it’ll disintegrate like Tubby Custard on the grater.
Tofu scrambled eggs? You want the OG extra firm. You want it to hold its form but still have that softness and give unless your goal is to imitate sad dining hall scrambled eggs.
Many such difficulties in today’s tofu landscape
They should be printing the tofu's mechanical properties like it's a structural material.
Packaging should have one of these
#my trick for checking tofu firmness on the packaging is to look at the kj per 100g#more kj per 100g = less water content #if one tofu has 300kj per 100g and one tofu has 500kj per 100g then I know which one's gonna be wetter and softer (via @demiurgenesis)
Hello??
Hello!!!???
Shaking your hand shaking your hand shaking your hand???????
These are the random extra/super firm tofus in my fridge and the labels are based on my own experience with them. Completely in alignment with this trick hello????????????
In 2026, the chicest thing a gay actor can do is never explicitly come out as gay but also make it abundantly clear that he is. Coming out is too modern. Staying closeted is too old fashioned. But this method merges contemporary freedom with Old Hollywood glamour and allure, and it weeds out the dumbest people who truly don’t get it. I call it the Pascal Method.
Taylor Swift does this
no she doesn’t
You clearly don't go here or to queer history and signaling, or both, enough to have this conversation and I'm not going to explain it to you. You could have asked questions, you could have done even a modicum of research. You didn't and you made yourself look ignorant. Goodbye.
French-Iranian author and illustrator Marjane Satrapi, best known for the book and film “Persopolis”, has died of "sadness", members of her
This one hurt, her work had such a profound effect on my life, thoughts, and politics.
May her memory be a blessing

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you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid
i have a personality flaw that always positions me on the side of characters who are hiding everything and refuse to accept help. like do NOT confide in people. confiding in people is the enemy. REAL winners lie and lie and continue lying until they ruin every single thing theyve got going for them & didnt fix a single goddamn thing. keep digging grandpa youre almost there
hate when I rb a post that i think is just good but it turns out it's vaguing like fifteen other posts and now it looks like I've take a Stance even though I just woke up and haven't even been born yet truly
this is literally how it feels
its awesome that neither mind reading nor god are real and all of the thoughts inside of your head are completely private and consequenceless forever #myprivacy

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I feel like I need to share this because idk if Europeans are familiar with the presence of Aldi in the US, but at least especially in my area they’ve been growing a lot recently. Like Aldi bought out some local failing grocery chains where I live (Louisiana) and have opened Aldis in all these somewhat rural communities and small towns, which for the record I’m fine with
But as a result of this they are advertising a lot more in my area and also in many cases, the people in these areas have never been confronted with Aldi or any European grocery store. So the ads that Aldi is pushing out to its new US customer base feature a cowboy shopping at Aldi who is explaining to new Aldi customers how Aldi works. Like this cowboy is explaining you gotta put a quarter in the shopping cart and why there are very little name brands. A cowboy is how they want to reach their American customer base. They gave us a cowboy
Here he is, the Aldi Cowboy
got the bus back home today and it was my fav bus driver, he let me on for free. went to tap my card but he just said 'beep!' and was like on you go. lol. then he nearly ran a red light and slammed on the breaks, almost sending the gaggle of older ladies at the front careening to the ground. he had to slam on the breaks and jolt the whole bus a second time later in the route because of a rogue lollypop man who'd come out because of roadworks. one of the old ladies said 'am glad ave nae got any eggs! ha ha!' and everyone on the bus laughed jovially. kind of a sitcomesque bus journey