quark-nova - Tumblr blog

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A sphinx moth enjoying moonflowers in the garden.

Cochise County, Arizona, September 2023.

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i just found out tumblr was storing over three GIGABYTES of cookies on my device without me knowing and that's why it's been running so fucking slow recently... incredible. anyways everyone go clear your fucking cookies. don't let this website run a goddamn video game's worth of disc space in the background for no good reason.

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fell for the oldest trick in the book

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yeah that's a dart frog okay

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It's like squamate biology where there are true wyverns but also a bunch of other dragons that convergently lost their other two legs but are still called dragons, a group of burrowing wyrms descended from dragons that also lost them but are considered neither wyverns nor dragons, and sea serpents that turned them all into flippers and no one knows whether they still count as legs or not.

the dragons and wyverns thing makes me so unreasonably mad i’m sorry

actual biology: whales are fish because they evolved from mammals which evolved from reptiles which evolved from fish. everything is much more complicated than the simple boxes our brains like. what classifies a species is somewhat arbitrary human concept

losers: that’s a wyvern because it has 2 legs and 2 wings, dragon is incorrect >:(

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Working on new stickers and patch designs!!

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you can't support the normalization of the usage of singular they/them pronouns and then say you don't support people who want to normalize it/its because it's "too weird," as if using singular they/them pronouns isn't clearly weird to a lot of people.

you can't refuse to acknowledge an identity because it's "weird," they're all "weird" in the eyes of cisheteronormative society. people who use neopronouns like it/its, ze/hir, xe/xem, thon/thons and others don't deserve to have to settle for they/them if that's not what they use. it doesn't matter if something is "weird" or not. let go of the compulsive need to assimilate and just let people express themselves freely

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japan: every time a really weird fossil animal comes out we make art and models of it for 20 years and put it in our manga and documentaries and-

america: we've been jerking off tyrannosaurus for the last 100 years and we do not plan to stop any time soon

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Interaction between species other than predator/prey

Prehistoric ecosystems and plants! Grasslands are super recent

Things I want to see more in paleoart

(Mostly just a list of things I plan to draw in the future lol)

More scars and not just on carnivores.

Dinosaurs being silly (all animals are silly sometimes)

More colourful sauropods

Genera that aren't well known

The type of paleoart that's basically a eulogy to extinct species. I can't quite describe it rn but it makes me experience shrimp emotions.

(feel free to add things that you want to see more in the notes as well)

(also please note that this is just a list of things I want to see more of, I don't want to see less of other things that aren't on this list.)

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"Here are your tortured poets. All from Mahmoud Darwish to Dr. Refat Alareer to Khaled Juma, these are tortured poets. Tortured by longing for a home they can never return to, tortured by the world they were born to for BEING BORN. Palestine, home to the tortured poets department." [@/folkoftheshelf on X. April 20th, 2024.]

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you will always be a moid

i will always be...

amoeboid

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this is what i'm doing with my tumblr mutuals

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Sorry if this is a silly question but is it ok if I follow you if I’m a Tolkien blog? I completely agree with your criticism of racism and racial/bioessentialism in Tolkien and fantasy inspired by him and attempt to critique those themes when applicable but if you’d be more comfortable if I did not follow I completely understand!

Oh you're probably here from that post that I worded a little clunky. To clarify: I am a huge Tolkien fan boy and I have an entire shelf in my house dedicated to all of his works, reference books included. I don't have some of the newer releases from his estate and the recent audio books are on my wishlist, but otherwise I own pretty much everything published with his name on it. So, in short, a Tolkien blog would simply be a fellow fan :]

I had a roommate for a while that hated Tolkien, in her opinion his works are irredeemable due to the sexism, racism, and related age of his works. I do agree that there is discussion to be had about the sexism and racism, as well as the constraints of his time, and how as the modern-day father of fantasy many derivative works don't put in the work required to perhaps fixing things he himself discussed as problems with his works in his many letters and journals- of which I have published copies on aforementioned bookshelf.

HOWEVER I think "irredeemable" is too far a step, not just because I'm a fan of his works, but because I think it's really not his fault that people inspired by his writing chose not to engage with fixing the problems the man himself admits to not being satisfied with. Most of his fame came after his death, so it's not like he was alive to fix it, and also when shitty people took the wrong message from his works we also have proof he told them to fuck off and that he hated that they touched his stuff.

The reason I'm online in the first place is because at a ripe 11 years old I wanted to talk to other Tolkien fans. 20 years later, I'm still of the same mindset.

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i don't know guys i kinda like this one

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eSIMs for Gaza is on Wikipedia's main page!

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#gay

this is what i'm doing with my tumblr mutuals

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I love how they decided to just, re-evolve the sea snake thing a second time

Banded Sea Krait aka Yellow-lipped Sea Krait (Laticauda colubrina), family Elapidae, South Pacific

Venomous.

photograph by Giordano Cipriani