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This was news from thee newscast here (Tagesschau) so the article is only in German but here my favourite parts:

- for a long time the only reason they knew the worm existed were the traces it left on the corals it ate, no one ever saw it

- until one day they found a one point five metre long part of the worm that was still wiggling

- only the part was missing the head, and the corals continued to be eaten, so apparently the worm just got rid of its bum and continued on like normal

- DNA tests of the bum could not determine its species, only that it is in some way related to the bobbit worm (also called eunice aphroditois), so this might be an entirely new species

- the worm is called 'Phantom'

- they installed cameras for four days, but didn't manage to capture the worm, after removing the cameras the worm continued eating the corals - right where the cameras had been

- the guy who positioned the camera said to that 'Lots of material, sadly extremly little worm, as in neither a long nor the short worm. We haven't seen anything.'

- now they have installed a camera again and a popular german news channel is streaming the whole night so that everyone can search for Phantom:

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In a study published today in Scientific Reports, UNSW Sydney researchers found that the underwater songs of leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx) in Antarctica share structural similarities with the nursery rhymes often sung by humans to their young. "Leopard seal songs have a surprisingly structured temporal pattern," says Lucinda Chambers, a UNSW Ph.D. candidate and lead author of the study.

Continue Reading.

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Breakfast acquired! Caffeine will have to wait til my wife wakes up

It is 8:30 and I'm already four bandaids in

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It is 8:30 and I'm already four bandaids in

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which lenox spice village house are you living in? i'm tarragon

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I briefly entertained doing something with the traditional anniversary gift list but based on the track record it'll have to be a massive mixed media in year 47 or something

@shardreach and I have not been married super long, but we do have a well-established anniversary tradition

Aka forgetting about it until we show up at my parents' for what we think is a normal visit and then realizing when they bring out an unexpectedly fancy dinner

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@shardreach and I have not been married super long, but we do have a well-established anniversary tradition

Aka forgetting about it until we show up at my parents' for what we think is a normal visit and then realizing when they bring out an unexpectedly fancy dinner

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Greer's Mexican Mountain Kingsnake (Lampropeltis mexicana greeri), family Colubridae, Mexico

photographs by HERP.MX

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ideal living situation is what i call the 'sitcom special' : having all your closest friends live in the same apartment building or neighborhood where you each have your own space but can wander in and out of eachothers homes at will, seemingly always welcome and never at bad times. and also all of you only have jobs when its important to the plot.

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A fabulous and wasp-friendly set of suggestions for when they crash your picnic. (Because we all gotta eat…)

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so in an attempt to actually use positive thinking, anytime i fuck up and my brain reacts as if ive cause a minor apocalyptic event, i compare my fuck up to the 4 minute fuck up committed by the crew of the uss william d porter.

and only today, as i was having to explain what happened to my mom when i was explaining the whole comparison thing, did i realise that most people dont know about it and ive decided that needs to change because its objectively hilarious.

...which is a weird thing to say about an event that occured on a warship in 1943, specifically november 14th.

see the uss william d porter was a fletcher-class destroyer but you dont need to know what that means, just that she had guns that went bang bang and that she was escorting another ship, the uss iowa, to cairo.

while they were on their way there, they performed some gun trials like testing the anti-aircraft guns or the torpedos. and while they were running a torpedo drill, the crew of the porter managed to fire a live torpedo straight at the iowa which you know, in terms of a list of things to do while escorting a ship, shooting a torpedo at them is not on that list.

especially if the president of the united states is on board.

yeah so fdr was on board and the gun trials were actually his idea, and part of the trials was that they were conducted under radio silence.

and that means the crew of the porter couldnt just call the iowa to be like "move out the way, we accidentally shot a torpedo at you."

but they did have signal lamps and you know, the signalman on board was trained to signal this exact kind of message.

...and uh never mind, the signalman did manage to successfully tell the iowa that a torpedo was coming toward them but wasnt as successful when it came to the direction the torpedo was coming from.

not all hope is lost though because the signalman could still use the signal lamp to correct his previous mistake and-, never mind, he announced that the porter was reversing, which she wasnt.

yeah so at catastrophic mistake number 3, they broke radio silence to warn the iowa and she managed to turn out of the way just in time which meant no one got hurt. and even though the inquiry into the incident led to chief torpedoman (fantastic job title btw) lawton dawson being sentences to hard labour, fdr intervened and waved away his sentence, saying it was all an accident.

but yeah, so thats my new measure for "how much did i really fuck up?" and when i compared accidentally picking up a pencil case without a tag on it in wilko, turns out it was a very minor fuck-up. yes, the cashier had to ask another worker to grab a duplicate so they could scan the barcode, but i didnt nearly kill the president during wartime via accidental friendly fire

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Saw it was make a terrible comic day today (June 24 2025) so meet my cats

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if u ever find a genie and you’re really craving a dessert that looks like this:

do NOT say “i’d like a lifetime supply of raspberry crowns”

while this is, in fact, the name of the pastry, it’s ALSO the name of a species of wasp for some reason. the genie, being a nasty trickster, will no doubt give you a bunch of wasps.

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