Back by Unpopular Demand

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

hbomberguy and co are over on bluesky pedojacketing patricia taxxon because she called him out for underpaying her as a freelancer for several years (including when she was a fucking teenager)

The posts about being underpaid came after Hbomb made his post, and after the dogpile was well underway. I think it deserves to be republished here, because it really is a dreadful instance of an artist being undercompensated:

Hbomb's post would be indefensible either way, but I think laying out the order of events illuminates things even further. Patricia Taxxon would be well within her right to call out being underpaid at any time, but as it stands she brought it up after Hbomberguy and his producer* contributed to the harrassment campaign against her. I would bet money that this is why Lily Alexandre deleted her post - because it validates Patricia's claim of underpayment that she posted in response to Hbomb pedojacketing her.

What we have here is a woman being piled on for the crime of venting that a man - who she did not even name - treated her poorly. "Lefttube" my ass.

[Also, while Patricia's account is currently deactivated, it is archived thoroughly on the Wayback Machine. I've seen people asking "posts are deleted, what happened" and I'd direct them to Patricia's words on the matter.]

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

i think this is…actually the most extreme stupid dove nest I’ve seen.

Japanese users were outraged that people were freely using creative work without permission. But Russians fired back, saying there’s basically no legal way to get most of that content in their country. They argued that when copyright holders block official access and payments, piracy ends up being the only option.

During the debate, Japanese users suggested some pretty extreme solutions—like just not watching anything at all, or traveling all the way to Tokyo to buy official copies. Then came a funny twist: the Japanese side proposed "pirating" Dostoevsky’s work as a kind of payback. The Russians quickly responded with links to legal, open-source libraries of Russian classics.

Authors set out to correct under-representation of female sounds – and found some surprising revelations

When we hear the beautiful call of a bird from a high bough, we’re told it’s likely to be a male – singing for territory, or belting out tunes to woo a female. But as the annual dawn chorus reaches a crescendo this spring, a new guidebook is urging us to think again – and turn our ears to the hidden world of female birdsong. The songs, sounds and sights of female birds have historically been overlooked in field guides and sound archives. In 2016, just 0.01% of the bird sounds in the global Xeno-Canto sound library were labelled female. Another sound archive was just 0.03% female, according to a 2018 study. But the new book – The Sound Approach to Birding 2 – aims to correct this under-representation and properly explain female birdsong. Female birds sing for territorial displays, to ward off other females and to attract extra males, according to Lucy McRobert, a writer and researcher who studied the issue for the guidebook. The book comes with its own library of 300 sounds from 200 species, accessed via web or app. The clips are drawn from the larger online archive of Sound Approach, a birdsong project founded in 2000 with confirmed recordings of females for 41% of species found in the Western Palearctic, a biogeographical region encompassing Europe, north Africa and most of the Middle East...