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[crochetingwhale]

YOU 🫵

look at my fish

okay you can keep scrolling

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I swear to god one of these days were going to see a video of Amaury Guichon and he's going to be making some wings and they are going to look dope as hell, the detail of each feather will be breathtaking, he'll spray paint them to perfection, but as the video goes on, he's not building any sort of winged creature, just the wings. And then there's a human-sized harness (also made of chocolate, somehow, he can do it). And he's attaching the wings to the harness. And he's putting the harness on and he demonstrates how he can flap the wings. And then he'll be off. Out the window and up and up and up. And we'll be looking at the livestream (it's a livestream now) and we'll scream "No, Amaury, the sun! It's going to melt the wings!". But he knows this already. And he is free.

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just found out that stoats hunt twice the size of them like rabbits by aggressively and eccentrically dancing around it with their little slinky rigatoni bodies so it can confuse the absolute fuck out of its prey until it can get close enough to jump on its back like some shadow of the colossus shit and take it down

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Know Your Bird-Related Auguries.

Original comic post.

SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ TWITTER ◆ STORE

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y'know those short sci-fi stories that take 20 minures to read, and then the rest of your life to think about? thats what your writing is.

Ha-ha, infected your brain!

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I have never once wished for Tolkien to still be alive as much as I do in this moment

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compilation of this type of post

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The Back to the Future musical was in general very delightful and fun, but I think my favorite part was seeing how they tackled making a stage show out of a movie, with occasional little jokes about the medium that fit a musical comedy.

Like, obviously there are a lot of scenes in the original movie with just Doc and Marty, but in a musical you want to have back-up for big numbers in the form of an ensemble, so they just... dressed them in flashy outfits and had them show up for some of the sillier numbers. And then had Doc and Marty, mildly bewildered, acknowledge their presence anyways (the first time it happens, Marty asks "Hey, Doc, who are the girls?" to which Doc replies "I have no idea, they just show up when I start singing")

The show definitely doesn't push too hard on the fourth wall, but it was really funny and fitting to at least poke at it, because of the whole "translation to a different medium allows for different jokes" principle.

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Camera-trapping data revealed in a new study show a steady recovery of tigers in Thailand’s Western Forest Complex over the past two decades.

The tiger recovery has been mirrored by a simultaneous increase in the numbers of the tigers’ prey animals, such as sambar deer and types of wild cattle.

The authors attribute the recovery of the tigers and their prey to long-term efforts to strengthen systematic ranger patrols to control poaching as well as efforts to restore key habitats and water sources.

Experts say the lessons learnt can be applied to support tiger recovery in other parts of Thailand and underscore the importance of the core WEFCOM population as a vital source of tigers repopulating adjacent landscapes.

The tiger population density in a series of protected areas in western Thailand has more than doubled over the past two decades, according to new survey data.

Thailand is the final stronghold of the Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti), the subspecies having been extirpated from neighboring Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam over the past decade due to poaching, habitat loss and indiscriminate snaring...

Fewer than 200 tigers are thought to remain in Thailand’s national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, only a handful of which are sufficiently undisturbed and well-protected to preserve breeding tigers. 

The most important of these protected areas for tigers is the Huai Kha Khaeng Thung Yai (HKK-TY) UNESCO World Heritage Site, which comprises three distinct reserves out of the 17 that make up Thailand’s Western Forest Complex (WEFCOM). Together, these three reserves — Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, Thungyai Naresuan West and Thungyai Naresuan East — account for more than a third of the entire WEFCOM landscape.

Now, a new study published in Global Ecology and Conservation documents a steady recovery of tigers within the HKK-TY reserves since camera trap surveys began in 2007. The most recent year of surveys, which concluded in November 2023, photographed 94 individual tigers, up from 75 individuals in the previous year, and from fewer than 40 in 2007.

Healthy tiger families  

The study findings reveal that the tiger population grew on average 4% per year in Hua Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, the largest and longest-protected of the reserves, corresponding to an increase in tiger density from 1.3 tigers per 100 square kilometers, to 2.9 tigers/100 km2. 

“Tiger recoveries in Southeast Asia are few, and examples such as these highlight that recoveries can be supported outside of South Asia, where most of the good news [about tigers] appears to come from,” said Abishek Harihar, tiger program director for Panthera, the global wildcat conservation organization, who was not involved in the study.

Among the camera trap footage gathered in HKK-TY over the years were encouraging scenes of healthy tiger families, including one instance of a mother tiger and her three grownup cubs lapping water and lounging in a jacuzzi-sized watering hole. The tiger family stayed by the water source for five days during the height of the dry season.

The team of researchers from Thailand’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Kasetsart University, and India’s Center for Wildlife Studies deployed camera traps at more than 270 separate locations throughout the HKK-TY reserves, amassing 98,305 days’ worth of camera-trap data over the 19-year study period.

Using software that identifies individual tigers by their unique stripe patterns, they built a reference database of all known tigers frequenting the three reserves. A total of 291 individual tigers older than 1 year were recorded, as well as 67 cubs younger than 1 year [over the course of the study].

Ten of the tigers were photographed in more than one of the reserves, indicating their territories straddled the reserve boundaries. The authors conclude that each of the three reserves has a solid breeding tiger population and that, taken together, the HKK-TY landscape is a vital source of tigers that could potentially repopulate surrounding areas where they’ve been lost. This is supported by cases of known HKK-TY tigers dispersing into neighboring parts of WEFCOM and even across the border into Myanmar.

Conservation efforts pay off

Anak Pattanavibool, study co-author and Thailand country director at the Wildlife Conservation Society, told Mongabay that population models that take into account the full extent of suitable habitat available to tigers within the reserves and the likelihood that some tigers inevitably go undetected by camera surveys indicate there could be up to 140 tigers within the HKK-YT landscape.

Anak told Mongabay the tiger recovery is a clear indication that conservation efforts are starting to pay off. In particular, long-term action to strengthen systematic ranger patrols to control poaching as well as efforts to boost the tigers’ prey populations seem to be working, he said.

“Conservation success takes time. At the beginning we didn’t have much confidence that it would be possible [to recover tiger numbers], but we’ve been patient,” Anak said. For him, the turning point came in 2012, when authorities arrested and — with the aid of tiger stripe recognition software — prosecuted several tiger-poaching gangs operating in Huai Kha Khaeng. “These cases sent a strong message to poaching gangs and they stopped coming to these forests,” he said."

...ranger teams have detected no tiger poaching in the HKK-TY part of WEFCOM since 2013.

-via Mongabay News, July 17, 2024

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10/10 funniest Spock moment is when he accidentally tells everyone he went blind bc he forgot he has an extra set of eyelids.

he ACTUALLY thought that HE, himself, was permanently blinded before going, 20 minutes later, “OH FUCK! I can see again”

normally that’s something Spock would do just to fuck with everyone but this time he also had his ass handed to him because he couldn’t remember HIS OWN NUMBER OF EYELIDS

best Vulcan ever. I know Starfleet is still telling stories about him to this day

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This is like the opposite of those posts going “that’s a painting?!”

Staircase, Photo by Fred Herzog, 1958

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have some pixel tea to cool you down during this heat~ buy a wallpaper or leave a tip / twitter / instagram / shop 

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The thing is that I miss the early seasons (primarily s1) depiction of the brothers' relationship with anger. Dean really is not an angry dude. He's violent, but it doesn't come from a place of rage. He genuinely believes that what he's doing is correct and just and he uses it as his primary outlet for self expression. It just happens to be the basis for his entire sense of identity and family because that's how he was raised.

Sam is the one who's driven by anger. It's his initial incident. The whole time that John is trying to indoctrinate him into hunting Sam is just like fuck this, this is bullshit, I don't even remember mom, I have no attachment to this, I just want to get out and be normal, but then the second his actual girlfriend who he loves gets killed, suddenly he's all about it. He'll do anything to kill Azazel and then later in S4 he has such a personal vendetta against Lilith that he jumps the gun and starts the apocalypse to kill her. It's an actual problem for his character and a lot of his decisions are made based on furious gut instinct.

But then later seasons flip the script and you get gentle giant Sam and rage issues Dean and I don't know how I feel about that. Partly because I can't track any actual, solid character arcs that get them from point A to point B other than a generic "Dean has more trauma to be pissed about over time" and "Sam naturally calms down and gains clarity with age" but it doesn't like??? It never clicks. And the dynamic also just isn't as interesting to me.

Like in Dean's case, that early disconnect between violence and fury almost makes him scarier. He'll fuck you up and it's not even personal. He's more desensitized to it than anything, like he's playing a video game. I'm thinking about the Gordon episode, which we all know is a disaster, but specifically the comment Dean makes about not really feeling anything when he slaughters a vampire with a buzz saw. Like maybe it's kind of fun for him, but that's it. That to me is fucked up. They shouldn't have used Gordon as a scapegoat for that mentality when the call was so clearly coming from inside the fucking house. Or Skin, an episode that proposes a slippage between violence and intimacy and leaves us with the incredibly fucked up insinuation that Dean, like the shapeshifter, is substituting one for the other because violence is simply all that he knows.

That's not only a disturbing and kind of fascinating dynamic, but one that begs to be complicated and deconstructed by that one central thing that Supernatural consistently fails to deliver on, which is the humanization of the other. It only works if Dean doesn't see werewolves or vampires or demons etc as people worthy of compassion. It sets him up to gain that insight over time as his primary character arc. Like for example, having Dean come back from hell in s4 with generic rage issues isn't as compelling to me as a scenario where he has more complex feelings about demons after experiencing the path to becoming one.

And the anger thing is really important to me overall because gets down to the key difference between Sam and Dean as John's sons, which is that Dean will never be John no matter how hard he tries whereas Sam has to fight like hell against replicating his father's worst tendencies. Everything that John taught Dean growing up ultimately stems from an innate rage and toxicity that just doesn't come naturally to him as a person. Once the surface-level justification of hunting as a noble cause collapses, Dean would be forced to reconstruct his entire worldview. Sam, who was disinterested in the heroism angle from the jump, does have that more personal fury bubbling under the surface, and the right circumstances bring it out in force. That's what the show begged to be about from the beginning. I just feel like they jettisoned all of this pretty heedlessly and it might be the absolute core of why the show ultimately fails to say anything meaningful about basically anything at all.

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So this happened at work today.

I

don’t know what to say