The girls are exeeerrrcising

don't hide your tags bestie this is so cute

Today I saw a pic of a baby cowbird next 2 its nest "parent" and it was so much bigger!!!!! Which is the sort of thing that gets normal people upset about the injustice of nest parasitism but makes *me* worry if baby cowbirds get bird dysmorphia

This (from Cornell Labs via Merlin) is the pic I was looking at. It's just a little baby but it's so much bigger than its "parent"!!!! Do baby cowbirds feel isolated? Do they understand they're a different bird, or are they just a really bad sparrow?

hey, good news! ecologists have been studying this very thing! it seems young cowbirds have some kind of innate sense that leads them to sneak out of their foster nest at night to hang out in grasslands where they—more often than not—meet other cowbirds and learn more about what they really are.

Thanks I am going to cry so hard I throw up ;-;

dialectic synthesis

my dads recently been jokin a lot about “mystic runes” like i asked what we were gonna do when we took a rest stop in santa barbara and he said “look for mystic runes” and then i asked if we were gonna eat or just walk around while my mom shopped and he said “the runes will tell us”

Shock me like an electric 

Friends in Distant Places, chalk pastel on paper

2023

"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.

Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.

We're not fast and don't have a lot of natural weaponry but we're bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.

I think it needs to become common knowledge that "inability to read social cues" can show up as overcompensating.

You don't know how much misbehaviour is allowed, so you become the perfect child who never tests rules.

You don't know if someone is irritated with you, so you'll be extra generous and self-effacing.

You don't know how much is expected of you at work so you'll kill yourself in a minimum-wage job and not notice that nobody else is working like this.

"Hardworking and quiet" should be as much of an autism red flag as "ignores rules and doesn't know when to stop talking". Or why don't we just start using words to communicate so i can stop tracking everybody's eyebrow twitches, that would be great.

Y’ALL. We have one of those cling film covers in our bathroom window for privacy and in the afternoon when the sun hits it just right, it makes rainbows, right? And today my wife sends me the best pic she’s ever taken:

Dartboard

I always find arguments about sites like the internet archive that hinge around "low culture" being unworthy of preserving to ring entirely hollow because like... what else would they preserve? even if they only preserved the important things, what's important enough and how would we even decide that in the moment?

it's not an especially great example, but I keep coming back to how I remember an oral history of the term "Eternal Force Blizzard" and have carried it for years, explaining it to people more often than I ever really expected I'd have to

it's a dumb meme that spawned out of people doing chuuni UBW knockoffs on 2ch, but there's no readily available information about what it is through google

the problem is, it still gets referenced by people who remember it, and those people work in anime, music, and game development now. people regularly stumble on references to it, look it up, and find a seemingly completely random spread of references to... nothing in particular

there's a weapon in onigiri, there's a line in watamote where tomoko mentions EFB (doubling as an AKB joke), there's weapons in Elona+ that perform the invocation, there's an utau track (sung by a now largely-forgotten attempt to follow up teto with a new parody voicebank), but people come up empty-handed trying to figure out how any of these are connected because the information just wasn't preserved well