quietdormouse

[quietdormouse]

choosing to believe they marked the rat video as mature bc they have a rat translator on staff and the little guy was actually swearing violently

This rat is not safe for work. A fiend.

[quietdormouse]

it's ebi and miso's day to turn 1 year old! happy birthday little soup and shrimp!!

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Ducklings on some lily pads.

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It took me forever to work on in short bursts while still injured, but sometimes and idea just sinks its teeth into you and won't let go. 🦁

[quietdormouse]

They like to cram as many as physically possible into one bed

[quietdormouse]

Creature spotlight: rodents

IDs in alt text - how many can you guess? :-)

This is a collection of creatures originally drawn for my sticker club. Learn more and see more of my work here!

[quietdormouse]

omG I SEARCHED GOOGLE FOR A SEWING MACHINE DIAGRAM AND THIS CAME UP I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING

[quietdormouse]

This is unrelated to anything else with the silly “Dire Wolf” controversy but them putting these images in all the articles give me the weirdest uncanny valley discomfort. Like it is hard for me to take these photos seriously. Do you know why?

Wolf pups just do not look like that. Because wolves typically have their pups in underground dens, it is an evolutionary advantage for the vulnerable pups to blend in with the dark earth of the den. If they were born white, they’d be sharply contrasted and easier for predators to spot. Even arctic wolves are born dark and gain their typical white coat a little later (though not all arctic wolves are white either).

Fun fact in Game of Thrones they used domestic dogs to play the dire wolf pups; puppy Ghost is cute but he’s clearly no wolf!

Giving birth to pups that are darkly colored is a pretty basic adaptation in a lot of canids that litter underground. Red foxes and arctic foxes are also born a very nondescript shade of dirt. Exceptions exist, but this is just a thing that a lot of wild canines do. Here are various canids (red fox, Ethiopian wolf, maned wolf, and African wild dog) that do this

I don’t know if we have any proof that dire wolves had their pups in dens but it would be kind of weird if they didn’t. So even if the dire wolf had a light coat as an adult they would likely still be born with a darker color to act as camouflage.

So when I keep getting this image

blasted on all my feeds you can understand why my brain has trouble registering it even as a gray wolf pup. It’s just weird. It looks like what chat gpt would spit out if you requested an arctic wolf pup. That thing would stand out like crazy in an underground den. You can make something look like something else all you want but the evolutionary history of a species is too complicated for us to ever faithfully recreate from scratch.

[quietdormouse]

Idk why but as a kid I used to get hysterically upset everytime I would imagine a gif of a rotating cow because I could never stop the cow from rotating no matter how hard I tried and I would be crying and no one knew why

[quietdormouse]

baby scrunch

[quietdormouse]

it's hard work being so so sleepytired

[quietdormouse]

No one had visited Undrin’s well in some time.

As she counted and recounted the coins (some bright and shiny, some dull and tarnished with age), she listened.

The deer and foxes yapped of the absence of the phantoms with their arrows and traps as they ran through well used trails.

The trees and grasses whispered of overgrowth and reclaiming the empty soil of the fields, roots overturning carefully placed fences.

The birds who could see far further than the edge of the woods sang of the stone nests, blackened and crumbling into ruin, empty streets littered with rusting iron weapons.

Undrin tended to the well, overgrown in the woods, and recounted her coins.

[quietdormouse]

guess who went on an unauthorized adventure today during cage cleaning? fall out boy did!

[quietdormouse]

Let me give you, the internet, and mostly myself, some executive function advice.

Sometimes, when you find yourself somehow unable to do a thing you need or want to do, one issue might be that your brain has subconsciously tacked on extra tasks, and those tasks are making the whole thing too overwhelming!

Tl;dr: don't do that!

For example, I like to track the books I read and I've been meaning to add a few books I've recently finished. But my brain has added that I should also write a review, and the exact dates I read them (which I can't even remember) and oh by the way I should finish moving my stuff over to storygraph and before I know it that 1 task has turned into 4! And my executive functioning says no.

In fact, while I was getting the idea to write this post, my brain went "wouldn't it be nice to also write a post about y and tag them all properly and go back through my posts and find all mental health posts and tag those too" and wouldn't you know it. 4 tasks.

Discard those extra tasks. Don't even write them down. They don't matter. Strip it down to the 1 task you started with and only do that.

Sure, you won't have achieved some theoretical better end result but that end result was never gonna happen anyway. It was paralysing you from getting the initial task done. And maybe once that initial task is done, you can get to one (1! not 4!) additional task. Later. Not now.

Half-assing is better than no-assing.

[quietdormouse]

I was thinking through what else I’m looking forward to this holiday season and I realized I haven’t mentioned it on here, just on discord, but— MY MOMS BEEN MAKING ME A REALLY COOL ART THING??

I think I’ve talked about it before, but my mom has been a quilter for most of my life and in the last few years started doing these really cool fabric collages, and it was my turn to request one so I asked for a phoenix cause I’m obsessed with this one art piece I did in art therapy ages ago

Anyway, my mom has been working on it and THIS was the last update I got???

I’m so excited for it?? Can’t wait to see where it’s at by the time I get there this weekend