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So I was looking up drawing reference and I think I just found my new favorite stock photo of all time

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What people think it means when we say "Language is evolving": This pejorative term isn't bad anymore because it's funny to me and I say so.

What it actually means when we say "Language is evolving": English has developed a specific verb for tricking people into listening to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up"

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when i was in like third grade i went to this science camp and one night at campfire they told us a story about a ufo crashing into a lake nearby and then later in the middle of the night they woke us all up and told us the aliens were back and this time they’d laid eggs in the woods !! it was our duty to arm ourselves and go destroy the eggs, so we armored up in tinfoil and shaving cream ( ????? ) and marched into the woods ready to save the planet. the ‘eggs’ were whole watermelons hidden around the camp and we had to smash them open on trees and rocks and eat the alien fetus/watermelon goo as fast as possible. i cannot emphasis enough the raw joy of digging into a watermelon with your bare hands and stuffing it into your face in the middle of the night in the woods, barely taking time to chew so that you can save the planet from hostile aliens, and i think i became the person i am because of that night.

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Tumbling Raspberries    -   Jacques Soulas

French , b.  1957 -

Oil on linen , 40  x  40 in.

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Is THIS why it's been so slow and crashing lately, not my huge number of tabs!? Argh.

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

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To inspire an untamable sense of urgency in regards to active, boot-laced compassion. To actively imagine a better world and to write it down so that others might imagine it as well. To destroy the myth of our collective powerlessness. To create beauty where there isn't yet beauty. To remind people they are not alone. To un-war our relationships to each other and to ourselves.

-Andrea Gibson (in response to the question "What is the role of the poet/artist in the current political climate?")

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Do y'all remember those chain emails from the late aughts where people forwarded emails that had been forwarded to them, either asking for something, spreading misinformation, or sometimes just containing jokes? Anyway, here's a funny one I received from my great-aunt via my father in February of 2010.

These sentences (with all the BLOOPERS) actually appeared in church bulletins or were announced in church services:

The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals..

The sermon this morning: 'Jesus Walks on the Water.' The sermon tonight: 'Searching for Jesus.'

Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.

Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community..

Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say 'Hell' to someone who doesn't care much about you.

Don't let worry kill you off - let the Church help.

Miss Charlene Mason sang 'I will not pass this way again,' giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.

For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.

Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all the help they can get.

Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.

A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.

At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be 'What Is Hell?' Come early and listen to our choir practice

Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.

Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.

Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.

The church will host an evening of fine dining, super entertainment and gracious hostility.

Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM - prayer and medication to follow..

The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.

This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church.. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin..

Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10 AM. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B. S. is done.

The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the Congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next Sunday.

Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use the back door.

The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.

The Associate Minister unveiled the church's new campaign slogan last Sunday: 'I Upped My Pledge - Up Yours'

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Stirrup spout vessel in the form of a quail, Nazca, 100-500 AD

from The Princeton University Art Museum

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There is a species of butterfly that lives in the mountains.

When it hatches as a caterpillar, it lowers itself to the ground on a strand of silk, and then produces a chemical that smells like the larvae of ants. An ant eventually discovers it, lured by the scent, and brings it back to the anthill, where it is cared for by the colony until it pupates. After a few weeks, the adult butterfly crawls back up through the anthill, through the dirt and the winding tunnels, and out into the sunlight before it can finally open its wings.

Some say that the caterpillar “tricks” the ants into doing this. I don’t know if I agree – I think it’s too small a thing to accuse of guile, don’t you?

With this in mind: Once upon a time, there were seven dwarves.

They lived and worked in the mountains, mining for gold and jewels and precious things. And one night, after a long day’s labour, they heard a knocking at the great stone doors of their mountain.

Outside, shivering and small, they found a human child.

I’m sure you can guess most of what she told them. Stepmothers were involved – it’s not important. What’s important was that each of the dwarves felt a dire and pressing need to care for the child, and they took her into their home, fed her, clothed her, and gave her a warm bed to sleep in. And many seasons passed around that mountain, with the dwarves raising the child as one of their own, until one autumn’s day.

The girl laid, slender and still, in a coffin of spun glass. And some weeks later, one of the dwarves had the idea to call for a prince. This was of course the sensible thing to do, and the prince of a nearby kingdom who listened to the story thought an ensorcelled girl would be a grand thing to rescue.

Poor devils. It feels cruel to judge them. But there were so many questions they could’ve asked – what was this stepmother’s name? Was she real? Did she exist? Who had made the glass coffin? Surely one of them must’ve thought of the question. And why did it grow more opaque with every passing day?

Were they wrong to trust?

I guess it doesn’t matter now.

The moment the prince stepped into the subterranean chamber with the glass coffin, it shivered with a twinkling, plinking noise. Threads of glass exploded into glittering, razor-edged confetti.

A claw split the great glass cocoon.

The thing that spilled out of it, hulking and huge, knew in the fog of its mind, in a base animal sense that screamed, that it was in a room too small for it to fit. It wanted up. It wanted out.

In front of it was some twiggy little thing holding a sword.

It took its first breath.

The flames were the colour of cornflowers.

The dwarves fled. The thing followed close behind, up, up, up through the stone and the winding tunnels, not to chase, not to hunt, but to get up, to get out, out, out–

It struck the great stone doors at a run. They crumbled like gingerbread. And then there was sunlight, and the open sky…

And it could finally open its wings.

Convergent evolution is a hell of a thing.

The dragon, of course, lived happily ever after with its loot of gold and jewels from a hastily abandoned dwarf mine. Being much bigger than a caterpillar, we could accuse it of tricking the dwarves who were kind to it, had taken it in, had fed and clothed and warmed it.

It probably wouldn't mind.

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“the arts and sciences are completely separate fields that should be pitted against each other” the overlap of the arts and sciences make up our entire perceivable reality they r fucking on the couch

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reallllly feel like some of you have to start understanding people are sometimes going to make mistakes and not understand something and not know things and it's going to slot them in a perfect place for you to scoff and call them problematic and evil and they're not even going to know why.

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(Sound on.) Bonus clip today: Penguins navigating stairs.

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✨️ The Enrichment has Enriched! ✨️

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Belgium Chase Tag Compilation