rainsfall - Tumblr blog

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Sheik

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actually i think graduates of a university should have access to the library databases forever and ever amen

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hey um this is double-plus ungood

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speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don't say numbers. don't give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it's secondhand.

the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.

you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it's no fun anymore.

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ID: three fish embroidered on an upholstery sample with a design that looks like coral. the fish are embroidered so they appear to be swimming in between the coral. the colors are shades of olive green and beige.

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I'm working on clearing out some old tabs, and ran across this piece from last fall. The short version is that your gut microbiome and other microbes that accompany you in a series of symbiotic relationships throughout your lifetime persist even after you die. While you might assume that these bacteria and other little beings would perish along with you once you're no longer warm and living, it turns out that they shift gears upon your death, being part of the massive effort to return your remains en masse to the nutrient cycle.

There's honestly something rather poetic about that. Here you've spent a lifetime being the center of a holobiont--a sort of miniature, migratory ecosystem. And these many millions of life forms that you have given safe harbor to for thousands upon thousands of their generations are among the funerary vanguard caring for your remains after you're gone. They pour forth from their ancestral lands--the gut, the skin, and other discrete places--and spread out through even the most protected regions of your form.

And then, just as you constructed your body, molecule by molecule, from a lifetime of nutrients you consumed, so do these microbes go through the process of returning everything you borrowed back to the wider cycles of food and growth and life and death. The ancient halls where their ancestors lived in relative stability are now taken apart in the open air, and their descendants will disperse their inheritance into the soil and the water through the perpetual process of decomposition.

I've always wanted a green burial, and I find it comforting that when my remains are laid in the ground, they'll be accompanied by the tiny ecosystems I spent a lifetime tending, and who will return the favor by sending my molecules off in a billion new directions.

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Poorly drawn Dratini line

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ed emberley pokemon!

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If you know anyone who seems really chill to the point of being virtually indestructible, like nothing could ever bother them in any way, could get hit by a train and just shake it off and be totally fine, laughing it off as soon as they've dusted themselves off and stopped bleeding, but who occasionally just randomly falls apart to complete fucking smithereens with seemingly no cause nor warning, only to get back up again a few minutes/hours/days later like "ok yeah I'm fine again that was weird lmao", and you've ever wondered what the fuck is up with that:

They are actually not ok and most likely are not ok at any point. The whole "hardiest person you know who just collapses randomly sometimes" thing isn't a deliberately constructed façade, as a matter of fact it might be something that they actually personally believe themselves to be. But in reality this is somebody who's either unintentionally learned or has been deliberately trained to hide negative emotions and mask symptoms at all costs, as the #1 priority that goes over any other survival needs.

So even though it may look like they go from 1 to 100 completely at random and unpredictably, and then swing right back again to being totally fine, you have no way of knowing how long they've been at 95% before the last line of defense broke down and the system collapsed. And once they flip back up, odds are that they just managed to scrape their shit back together again just enough to get their backup masking systems running. The "check engine" light never turned on because the wire was clipped years ago.

If this is you, this is your callout to seek some sort of help. I'm telling on everyone in this room including myself.

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Florida bans on trans care have been overturned! 🏳️‍⚧️

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I had a dream last night that tumblr came up with a pride flag for closeted gays and it was just a light blue flag with a shrimp on it. People would also wear shrimp pins on their lapels for some Reason???

and the vegan gays started Discourse because shrimp deserved more respect

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Nonhuman expressions of affection are great. Purring. Exposing weak points as a show of trust. Head bonks. Preening and chewing. Nuzzling. Biting. Intertwining tails. Feeding each other. Little chuffs, chatters, beeps and squeaks. Fluffing up of feathers, fur or other things. Dancing to impress. Cleaning their fur, scales, feathers or skin. Sharing body heat. Ears pointing toward those you care about to show your full attention is on them. Slow blinking.