Zombie Sassy

“Life after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Ken’s just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothers’ attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkids’ survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothers’ death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Males’ handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females don’t have the males’ impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the time—usually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the world’s champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other females’ young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them “career females,” because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, “White Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.” (Researchers sometimes call babysitters “aunts.” That’s precisely who they often are.)”

I've been pretty good about not making y'all look at my grad school work but I'm making an exception. I went all out on this model of the building that i designed for my thesis project. Between 3d printing the pieces, painting, detailing, and assembly, this has pretty much been my life for the last couple of weeks. But, pending a few touch ups to the paint, she's done!

So my dad was the assistant music editor on Tarzan, and idk if it was Bring Your Kid to Work Day or something but one day he did just that so there I was, this incredibly small 1st grader, in an absolutely cavernous recording studio with a full orchestra and a giant screen playing the scene they were taping the score for, and my little brain couldn't handle the big music and the big movie happening all at once so I started crying and it was the first time music ever brought me to tears and it was too much to take in so we stepped out of the studio and ran directly into Phil Collins, who looked to me very much like my dad, and in my delicate emotional state I became immediately convinced that my dad had been copied and nobody had told me so I started crying harder, and Phil Collins said something that was probably meant to be calming but it was with a British accent so I thought there was a copy of my dad in every country and I absolutely lost it at the notion that other kids would get to have my dad, and my dad ended up having to carry me back to the car.

Here's our most requested item: Bob Katter's same-sex marriage speech, in all its unhinged glory

“SCROLL BACK UP IT’S OIL ON CANVAS”

hey op is this you

me: isn’t it funny how captain kirk was supposed to be the sex appeal of star trek but it ended up being spock

For anyone wondering: it's called Hyalinobatrachium dianae, and Kermit Frog is one of its actual recognised names (alongside Diane's bare-hearted glass frog)

The reason I reached for genre romance novels for Star Trek is Ive read so so so many of them and I know roughly how most of them convey something about the culture that produced them, in content and structure and what it means for what a culture values in a partner, and in themselves. It’s somewhat easy to use the scaffolding I already know to use existing genre conventions to explain something about the aliens in Star Trek.

Holy shit!!!!!!! HUNGARY DID IT!!!!

things in fic I'm used to people kind of faking their way through writing about:

Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:

man i remember reblogging these very soon after i joined tumblr

they are oil paintings

I’d like to see the middle one as the great rose window of a fruit-worshipping cathedral.