chatoyance

did a bit of driving through the state of georgia today and wound up driving through a small town that i later discovered was called newborn, which is an odd name but doesn’t technically have anything wrong with it, except for the fact that i nearly gave myself whiplash doing a double-take at a building sign advertising NEWBORN TAXIDERMY

You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.

….. Didn’t know most of that

Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.

Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.

they need to come up with more words like necrosis and miasma and mausoleum and cadaver and morose and decrepit and stuff like that just so metal bands can expand their vocabulary

And we call these "Ampelmännchen" ("traffic lights little man").

i was on the way to the movies & i saw an old guy with a piece of wood over his shoulders. it was huge -- a pole several feet long with a kind of wide fan at the end of it. and i said "what the hell is that?" and he looked at me and had this kind of ear to ear grin, and he said "what do you mean 'what the hell is that'?" and he sat back on his heels, still with that big smile like the sun spilling from the underside of a cloud and waited for me to answer and i said "i mean i don't know why you're walking around with that thing, whatever it is." and he laughed and put down his pole and kinda clapped me on the shoulder. "can i get you a drink?" he said. and i said "no, the show's in ten minutes," and he said "oh? what are you seeing?" and i said "christopher nolan's odyssey, i'm pretty excited," and he sighed and picked up his oar and kept walking.

I don’t get the joke :( someone help me

in some versions of the Odysseus legend, Odysseus leaves Ithaca and is supposed to wander the world carrying a ship's oar until he finds a place where no one knows what it is. here, he encounters someone who doesn't recognize it, but since the narrator is going to see a movie version of the Odyssey, that anonymity can't last & he has to keep wandering.

Anyway shoutout to John Williams, amazing composer and probably the one who made the other 50% of "holy shit amazing" soundtracks (Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Superman, and incidentally the original Harry Potter theme and score) who famously worked closely with the first openly transgender woman to be nominated for an Academy Award, Angela Morley. He respected her, and so far as I can see, has never made transphobic remarks.

i miss vhs tapes and cds i miss feeding my computers and tvs yummy treats. now theyre eating nothing. theyre being born without mouths

thinking about diatoms again

microscopic living stars made of glass that eat the sun. and they're all around us. in every body of water. glass sun-eating stars.

and you know. like oblongs and triangles and some other bullshit

thank you op, this post gave me such reality whiplash that I had to go read the wikipedia for diatoms and now I have Learned Things :D

hooray!!! let’s all Learn Things every day [:

I have one of these and I keep it in my IT toolkit because that teeny little screwdriver is the right side for laptop casings, but because it lives inside a large object it’s harder to misplace than a standard tiny screwdriver. Also because the look on a client’s face when you bring out a brass hammer to fix their laptop is absolutely wild.

so many problems can be solved with just that one hammer