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every day of my life i look at roman seal rings and find another delightful and impossibly small scene that fills my heart with joy and whimsy. anyway here's a 1 cm seal ring stone of a mouse in a chariot pulled by a rooster

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Shoutout to my bf who every time I lie down next to him immediately pins my legs with his. I know he's doing it to preempt my power (absolutely jacked kangaroo legs) and he's right. I'm like a crocodile you pin me and I can't do shit

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you can't even be unemployed on a tuesday anymore. because of work

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Happy #makeaterriblecomicday2025! Please make a comic! It’s mandatory that you create some piece of sequential art — what it is and how you make it is up to you! Have fun! You might as well!

If you make a comic (again, it’s mandatory) and you want to share it, post it on the tag #makeaterriblecomicday2025! Or don’t, I’m not a cop.

Remember, the goal is to make something terrible! So if you can’t draw or have never made a comic, or if it’s been ages since you made something just for fun — that’s perfect! You’re all set! If you fuck up and make something that’s NOT terrible… well, some might say there’s joy in that too.

Ok stop reading this and go make something!!!

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“Yellow Bittern”

by Vo Rin, Vietnam

The 35 Photography Awards

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my jaw hit the floor

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youve heard of 'california sober'.. get ready for 'portland monogamous'

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Happy Birthday Undertale 

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forever haunted by the fact that no slime girl drawing i do will ever be better than the one my boyfriend drew of her in a hot tub

how can i compete with this

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Happy pride month to my dad. When I came out as bi to him, this man googled what it ment, look at me and said "ohh. Yeah. You get that from me. You'd have far more siblings of I only shaged women." And went right back to his work emails.

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I am small and I can't do very much. That is the despair of an individual in a big and violent world. But the plants teach me it is okay to be small. Everything is either small, or made of things that are small. We are all connected. Symbiosis.

So, on the subject of bugs.

It is the fourth summer of the Meadow. My plants grow strong and wild and cover more space than ever before. I have worked to eradicate the invasive lawn grass and carefully curate large clumps of only native species (with a few esteemed naturalized weeds allowed---I have no quarrel with Chicory, it has a positive effect on the ecosystem).

I have tall, huge native Field Thistles, multitudes of tough and aggressive evening primrose, wild strawberry spreading everywhere, a dozen vigorous gray-headed coneflowers, giant clumps of cup-plant, and so many asters and goldenrods that I've had to start targeting them in my weeding.

Yes, yes, I have the showy ones like purple coneflowers and black-eyed susans, but I also encourage and cultivate weird little weeds that are too inconspicuous or ugly to be often planted on purpose. White avens, lanceleaf frogfruit, nettle-leaf vervain.

There are too many plants. I'll spend forever listing them all. What is really interesting, is what's happened with the bugs.

Every year, there has been a much bigger variety and population of insects. I am both seeing many more species, and seeing the same species in much, much larger numbers. Even on the same plants that were already there 4 years ago, I can see way more bugs.

Flower flies, for instance. There are tiny yellow and black flies known as flower flies that are very beneficial for gardeners, because their larvae are predators that attack aphids. It used to be that I could often see a dozen, but now I see hundreds of them every time I go outside!

Or wasps. There are more species of wasps than I possibly could have imagined. It used to be that I would only see the reddish paper wasps, the ones that make big paper nests in the eaves of your house, but now, there are dozens of different wasps. Some are black, others black and white, others black and yellow, others black and brown, and they come in all different sizes. A bunch of blue-black wasps with white stripes live in the log next to my pond.

I identified them and looked up the species, and they had not been studied at all since the 1960's. Supposedly they are solitary species, but several different wasps have made nests inside the log right next to each other. That's the first interesting thing. The second interesting thing is that the nests were first inhabited last summer, and the same species of wasp still lives in them, so their town has been inhabited for multiple years instead of being abandoned when the larvae emerge. Has the next generation taken over the old nests? I am observing something about the species that is not known to science.

Wasps are hated and feared, but my wasps have never been anything but peaceful and polite, and they have so much beauty and importance in the ecosystem.

And the bees! I am observing bees this year that I had never even heard of before. Many of them are so tiny, I doubt they could even reach the nectar in large flowers like purple coneflower. What if the small, inconspicuous flowers are essential for smaller pollinators like the tiny bees? That would make sense. Different flowers evolved to attract different bees.

Beetles, ants, leafhoppers, flies, moths, butterflies, all kinds of bugs. Specific plants attract specific bugs, but it is not the plants individually that restore insect biodiversity, it is the way the plants interact and form a bigger ecosystem.

What I mean is, as my garden grew, the increase in bugs was not linear in relationship to the plants, it was exponential. The combination of the many different plants into an ecosystem attracted many more bugs than would be expected from the sum of each plant individually.

I remember the emptiness and barrenness before. I see it around me when I visit other places. The disappearance of bugs. The insect apocalypse. It's so clear to me now. The cause is biotic homogenization. I call it plant sameness.

Everywhere around me, landscapes have been made into expanses of the same few plants. But when plant sameness is replaced by variety and diversity, many plants interacting in many different ways, everything changes.

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“Memory and Delusion” by Shirley Jackson

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they should invent an apartment that has huge windows but is never too hot and is near everything i like and all my friends but is also quiet when i want it to be and costs zero dollars or perhaps they pay me to live in. and they save it just for me so i dont have to look for it :)

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imo sharing your art for free online for strangers to see it requires a lot of courage. A lot of mental strength. Im being serious rn i think if youve ever shared anything online and even if its not popular even if only a few people have seen it i think thats very very brave

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What did these scientists from the Museum, working with colleagues from the Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras, find on the beach in Colombia?

The Constantine S. Niarchos Expedition featured here was generously supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

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american puritan names have nothing on the first name of this 17th century dutch woman artist i just read about. my girl Tesselschade ('texel damage') named after the shipwrecking of her father's 44 trade ships on the coast of the island Texel in 1593.