Adulthood is overrated

@screengifs best of 2025: scene

He opened his eyes. He was on the plane. [...] “You’re dying,” Armand said softly. “ ‘And though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’ et cetera,” Daniel whispered. His throat was so dry. And his head ached. Didn’t matter saying what was really on his mind. All been said long ago.

Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!

It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey

They are, of course, named after Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street!

Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!

And you just.

Said no????

Verdict: ACCEPTED

Gay people are INCREDIBLY ANNOYING for production when they are on reality shows cause they always do shit like this. Reality shows pick their cast specifically for people who will create drama, so it tracks that bringing in some gay people (in the era that I worked, 2013-2018, this was considered to be new and interesting) would diversify people enough to create some conflict. To a degree, this was true.

But what actually happened was that the gay person, or worse, people, would end up estranged from the other people because Straight People Who Are Fucking Nuts in a way that would be ideal for a reality show are very different from Gay People Who Are Fucking Nuts.

There's one particular instance I remember in which our Gay Person tm wasn't getting into drama and no one could figure out why. Any time anything happened it would just defuse almost instantly. Eventually we prodded during a solo interview and one of the guys said something along the lines of "Mayn gay marriage just got legalized n shit if I yell at this guy I'm being a homophobe". This meant that our gay was COASTING along in this reality show cause no one would vote him out!!

But you know what the PINNACLE of this was?

DATING SHOWS.

One... Very popular dating show I worked on (you know the one) has an unofficial, unwritten rule: you can only have 1 queer woman in the cast of ladies. This is because for a solid few years, if ever there were two bisexual women in the show, they would ALWAYS abandon the man and run off together instead. You can't have contestants saying shit like "this guy has no personality and sucks ass. I prefer this girl I met who actually listens to me". Like this was an actual epidemic in the casting. It happened over and over for YEARS and they couldn't find a way to stop it without literally separating the women from each other, which obviously wouldn't be good for the show. They also couldn't show this was happening because that. Uh. Would be pretty bad to reveal to audiences.

Eventually they just decided to subtly prod and see if women who were going on the show were gay and then avoid having two on the same season at the same time. To my knowledge they still do it this way.