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Snow Leopard in India. 2022

©Sascha Fonseca

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my extremely powerful long chip (utahraptor toe claw for reference)

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on their clit like morse code

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I think I may never be sad ever again. There is a statue entitled "Farewell to Orpheus" on my college campus. It's been there since 1968, created by a Prof. Frederic Littman that use to work at the university. It sits in the middle of a fountain, and the fountain is often full of litter. I have taken it upon myself to clean the litter out when I see it (the skimmers only come by once a week at max). But because of my style of dress, this means that bystanders see a twenty-something on their hands and knees at the edge of the fountain, sleeves rolled up, trying not to splash dirty water on their slacks while their briefcase and suit coat sit nearby. This is fine, usually. But today was Saturday Market, which means the twenty or so people in the area suddenly became hundreds. So, obviously, somebody stopped to ask what I was doing. "This," I gestured at the statue, "is Eurydice. She was the wife of Orpheus, the greatest storyteller in Greece. And this litter is disrespectful." Then, on a whim, I squinted up at them. "Do you know the story of Orpheus and Eurydice?" "No," they replied, shifting slightly to sit.

"Would you like to?"

"Sure!"

So I told them. I told them the story as I know it- and I've had a bit of practice. Orpheus, child of a wishing star, favorite of the messenger god, who had a hard-working, wonderful wife, Eurydice; his harp that could lull beasts to passivity, coax song from nymphs, and move mountains before him; and the men who, while he dreamed and composed, came to steal Eurydice away. I told of how she ran, and the water splashed up on my clothes. But I didn't care. I told of how the adder in the field bit her heel, and she died. I told of the Underworld- how Orpheus charmed the riverman, pacified Cerberus with a lullaby, and melted the hearts of the wise judges. I laughed as I remarked how lucky he was that it was winter- for Persephone was moved by his song where Hades was not. She convinced Hades to let Orpheus prove he was worthy of taking Eurydice. I tugged my coat back on, and said how Orpheus had to play and sing all the way out of the Underworld, without ever looking back to see if his beloved wife followed. And I told how, when he stopped for breath, he thought he heard her stumble and fall, and turned to help her up- but it was too late. I told the story four times after that, to four different groups, each larger than the last. And I must have cast a glance at the statue, something that said "I'm sorry, I miss you--" because when I finished my second to last retelling, a young boy piped up, perhaps seven or eight, and asked me a question that has made my day, and potentially my life: "Are you Orpheus?" I told the tale of the grieving bard so well, so convincingly, that in the eyes of a child I was telling not a story, but a memory. And while I laughed in the moment, with everyone else, I wept with gratitude and joy when I came home. This is more than I deserve, and I think I may never be sad again.

Here is the aforementioned statue, by the way.

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i see all your pjo time travel AUs with ancient greece and I raise you: random timeperiod between ancient greece and canon era heart of the west, like time travelling to when the gods were with the Spanish Empire and are big mad about christianity. i think it would be very compelling, funny, and neatly explains why Character does not appear in myths.

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people out here doing real math when i know a parking meter is an hour per monies given

I wonder how much time a meter is

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just born yesterday. me and my dumb fuck life

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hot croc bun

patreon | twitter

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it’s so bizarre when animated American films are set in a certain location and then only certain characters have the accents of that place. It makes no damn sense!! like

WHY IS SHE MORE FRENCH THAN THE REST OF THEM???

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Spin this wheel first and then this wheel second to generate the title of a YA fantasy novel!

(If the second wheel lands on an option ending with a plus sign, spin it again)

Share what you got!

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daily affirmations:

i am kind

i am in control of my emotions

it does not bother me when someone is in the kitchen while i was planning to be in there alone

everyone in the house has the right to be in the kitchen

i am kind and in control of my emotions even when someone is in the kitchen while i was planning to be in there alone

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Fucking, thank god for grad students. Grad students are truly the GOAT of science. A lot of scientific research is limited by what kinds of research can produce results that might be profitable for businesses, including the journals that publish that research in the first place. But grad students? They're not trying to make money for anyone, they're trying to prove themselves as scientists before entering the professional world. The only thing a master's or doctorate thesis is supposed to do is prove to your university that you have mastered your craft and are capable of producing research that meets the standards of the scientific community. The only job that a graduate student has when producing that thesis is to do good research that has never been done before. They're just about the only scientists whose sole prerogative is to look where no one else has looked to answer questions that no one else has, possibly because no one else has even asked them yet, and to compile their results, whatever they are, for the pure sake of knowledge itself.

I'm not a scientist, I'm just someone who does scientific research in my free time because I'm deranged enough to think it's genuinely fun, and because a lot of the art I do is scientifically informed. But because I'm doing this research for art rather than a more "practical" application, a lot of the times the reasons why I want to know something are completely different from the reasons why these topics are actually studied. I don't want to know how to create synthetic equivalents of Feline Facial Pheromone F3, whose function we already know, in order to reduce stress and prevent undesirable behavior in pet cats in new homes and vet clinics, I want an analysis of the components that make up Feline Facial Pheromones F1 and F5, whose functions we don't know, in order to start building hypotheses about what those functions might be, so that I can figure out how catgirls would perceive these pheromones and theorize how they might talk about them in their native languages. But nobody's gonna pay me to do that, are they?

And let me tell you, sometimes the only people who seem interested in the kinds of bizarre and esoteric questions that an artist like me will have are grad students publishing theses. I still haven't found anyone trying to figure out what FFP F1 or F5 are used for, but I have found:

A full, comprehensive description of the complete phonology and grammar of the Lushootseed language and its dialects, spoken by several Coast Salish tribes of the Puget Sound region, published by Ted Kye in 2023 for his doctoral thesis at the University of Washington. Lushootseed is the source of many words from the region, including hugely important place names like Snoqualmie, Muckleshoot, Puyallup, Snohomish, Sammamish, Duwamish, Mukilteo, Shilshole, and of course, Seattle, but the language itself is extinct, with its last native speaker, Vi Hilbert, dying in 2008. There are, however, efforts to revive the language, and that would be significantly more difficult without Ted Kye's work. I think we can all see why this kind of thing is valuable.

And, this second one is a bit more esoteric but hear me out:

The discovery that a popular ornamental aquarium fish might actually have been sequentially hermaphroditic this whole time, which was practically a footnote in a 2016 thesis by Lia Gomes and Silva Henriques from the University of Porto, in Portugal. The fish in question is the red-tailed shark, Epalzeorhynchos bicolor, which is not an actual shark, but a member of the carp family that just happens to look like a shark, and two very important things to note about it are that it is critically endangered in the wild, and in fact was thought to be totally extinct in the wild until one was found in 2014, and that they are also practically impossible to breed in captivity. The primary threat to the species is considered to be habitat destruction. The quite substantial supply of this species in the pet trade today all come from fish farms in Southeast Asia, which use hormones to induce reproduction in the species, through processes that are kept as trade secrets and are essentially unknown to the scientific community. So, we have literally no idea how this fish breeds, which means that hobbyists can't breed it themselves, and scientists don't know what conditions they even need in order to breed in the wild. This one paper, written by students in Portugal who attempted to induce gonadal maturation in the species using hormone injections, is perhaps one of the only clues we have on the path to saving this species, and it hints at a conclusion that could have HUGE implications for the husbandry, captive breeding, and survival in the wild of the red-tailed shark: all of the individuals that were dissected without having undergone hormone injections were immature females, and immature males only started appearing in groups that had been injected, suggesting that all individuals of the species might start out as females, and then at some point in their development, certain individuals, for unknown reasons, may develop into males instead, making them sequential hermaphrodites. This isn't unknown in fish (clownfish do something similar, except they all start out as males and become female when they achieve dominance in their social group), but it was completely unexpected in this species, and could go a long way in starting to explain the difficulties with breeding them and potentially be a step on the path to learning how to breed them in captivity, as well as saving them in the wild.

Unfortunately, in the latter case, I wasn't able to find any other published work by either of the listed authors, and no one else seems to have repeated the experiment. This is a real shame, because the results of the experiments, while very intriguing, weren't conclusive; they had a fairly low sample size, and would need to be confirmed by further research. But there's no indication of that research being done, and I might be the only one other than the university's board of reviewers who's even read the thing.

All this is to say, fish testicles are interesting and I'm begging someone to do more research on them, please.

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was looking for photos of the mountains in subnuatica and i found a decent photo but then i looked at it for longer than 2 seconds and immediately said out loud:

"you BITCH this isn't mountains, it's craig's field!!! bonesharks aren't native to mountains (there was one in the photo), mountains don't have those steep spikes geographically, and eyestalk (which was also in the photo) only spawn in mountains in caves, and this photo is of the (underwater) surface! AND THE WATER OF MOUNTAINS IS TEALER THAN THAT!!!"

and then i realized id basically just said "this photo of rocks and sand is actually the wrong photo of rocks and sand you hoe-ass bitch" and now i think i maybe need to take a break from subnautica for a little bit. just maybe

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oh my god little cat shove shove glass off then shove shove glass back

Cats getting caught doing crimes