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i would die on the field of battle to protect the honour of the ds family of handhelds

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Just in case anyone else was curious.

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As of December 2024, The Cook Islands' Palmerston Atoll was declared entirely rat free. This was after significant eradication efforts and monitoring to confirm the rats were gone, both of which involved the local community. Removing the rats has helped to improve food security and safety for residents, as well as increasing the prevalence and numbers of native wildlife.

Arthur Neale, the atoll’s Executive Officer, says Palmerston’s rat-free status means the world to him and everyone else who lives on the atoll. “Rats infested the atoll for over a century. They ate our crops, invaded our homes and harmed local wildlife. We saw the rat problem becoming worse, with the potential to seriously undermine our resilience in the face of climate change impacts. “Benefits from the rat eradication are already evident. Our food security has improved massively. Fruits like guava, mango and star fruit are now abundant and free from rat damage. Our nu mangaro (a coconut tree variety) are thriving. Vegetables, especially cucumbers, have seen an astonishing increase in yield. “We’re very excited to see more native species now rats are no longer eating them. Seedlings of tamanu and puka are increasing and we’re seeing and hearing more birds. Wood pigeons and red-tailed tropic birds have returned to Home Islet. Crabs and lizards appear to be more abundant.”

Here's a cool video from a few years ago covering the work to remove rats and inclusion with the local community (Just a heads up the video does show dead rats a couple of times).

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Since that post about how dalmatians should have been in a Terry Pratchett novel has been going around, I'd like to add that he'd have adored black-bumper Mennonites - a group that dictates avoiding ostentation and "worldliness" and does so by, among other things, only purchasing black vehicles and painting the chrome bits black. The inherent worldliness of going to this amount of work about such a small part of a normal piece of life always struck me as kind of a sad irony.

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getting murdered but i can’t even afford the name brand stuff so im getting snawed in half and scrabbed to death and shit

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They don’t tell you this but in the United States there is an extremely low chance to encounter a vehicle shaped like a hotdog

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>be an 8th grade English teacher

>have an asocial student who draws on all her tests

>hey at least she doesn't do it on scantrons

>start leaving compliments towards her art when i grade her papers

>fast forward a few months

>notice she's drawing on her test as I'm doing my rounds around the class

>ask her what she's drawing

>this thirteen year old emo girl looks up at me with the wettest eyes I have ever seen

>"you if you were in Family Guy."

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slamming the big red button on my desk labeled "bweh" over and over again to no discernible effect

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one time i took a picture of a tiger at the zoo and the tiger smiled for the picture it was very great and the best picture i’ve ever taken

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"every possible kind of content can be found on the internet" yeah sure except for the One fucking thing I'm looking for. why does no one want to talk about the One Singular thing I'm looking for. but yeah other than that everything is on here.

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Hey, fellow fantasy nerds, I invite you to vibe along to this lesser known early 2000s fantasy banger 

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Today I went to the science museum. It was basically empty. You might think of course it was, it's a natural history museum, shouldn't you be doing things specific to Florence? Buddy this museum has had the same badly-taxidermied hippo for three hundred years, and for a hundred years before that a different museum had it. Multiple European scholars with varying levels of hippo expertise have tried to improve it over the centuries. You can't see stuff like that just anywhere. The description mostly just talks about everything that's wrong with the hippo, and how the current curators have worked to preserve the different layers of alterations and attempted fixes, while also stabilizing the specimen:

Its unnatural position and unappealing details make us suppose that its taxidermists have never seen it live. For example, although it is a digitigrade animal, the position of its feet was prepared like that of a plantigrade. [...] Two different approaches thus coexisted for over two centuries: a seventeenth-century one "cabinet of curiosities" like and a late eighteenth century one, with a naturalistic aim. [...] Therefore, a restoration, completed in 2012, was necessary which highlighted the two different approaches of preparation, allowing to enhance its original appearance, but also preserving the beautiful wax modeling reconstruction of the details of the head.

Here we have, in part, a history of "exotic" European zoological inquiry in microcosm. Everybody's all oh let's go see the important church, or the other important church, even though the line is an hour long, and no one wants to look at the fucked up hippo with me.

Also, I want to be clear: this was a great museum and I think more people should go and would have a great time there even without knowing or caring much about the history of science (or even being as easily amused by taxidermy as I am). Their current exhibit juxtaposes actual historical taxidermy with modern art of fantastical medieval-esque imagined creatures. And their collection of wax anatomical models is fascinating (and quite famous). They have a lovely mineral collection, too.

Also if you like me are easily lost, and you get confused about how to leave, you can just follow the wheelchair-accessible path because it's the only one you can find that leads to the exit! And then you get to see a surprise giraffe in a corner by the elevator, away from all of the other taxidermy. Why not!

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No more mochas at 2pm while on Vyvanse, I guess

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the paul mccartney is dead conspiracy theory is the funniest thing in the world because i feel like if he did die and the beatles did replace him like parents replace a gold fish and the new guy managed to look exactly like him and play left handed bass, piano, and vocals in the same style and produce the same quality of music consistently for 30+ years then it'd be honestly rude to mention it at that point. like he's earned it let him have it

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Talkin about Murderbot show, opinions not entirely positive

The first episode was... Mid? There were some really good choices made with the presentation of the PresAux team. I felt like the actors were all well-cast and good at their jobs, but unfortunately the failings in the writing weren't ones that could be easily saved by a great cast.

All the problems with the writing came down to overexplaining - the voiceover narration is the most convenient place to do that, so it got hit hard. Skarsgard does a really good job as Murderbot when he's actually in a scene, but my first impression was "oh god he's unsalvageable", because you get so much of that godawful narration before he actually gets to act. It's giving DreamWorks smirk/record scratch freeze frame I bet you're wondering how I got here. I was at a loss at first to figure out why they didn't just lift more book lines, if they were having so much difficulty making it not cringe, but then I realized: most of the reason MB's book narration doesn't stray into aggravating snarky cliché is that it trusts its audience and therefore has the freedom to be snappy. Can't open with any iconic lines about governor modules if you've gotta painstakingly dwell on the concept first.

The narration's deep fear of the audience ever having any questions really coloured my enjoyment of other bits of the show, too, bits that I'd have loved as really neat adaptational choices if I'd thought I was watching a show that made those kinds of choices. There's a scene where Mensah, in the Company HQ faced with having to bring a SecUnit on the expedition, gets up and announces that they'll need a consensus. And I thought, that's a great choice for this scene, a nice introduction to the setting to have this be an insane culture shock for the Corporation Rim emplo- why are they singing.

And, see, if I hadn't already been primed by the voiceover to assume this show thinks I'm stupid, I might have thought, oh, what a neat adaptational choice to lean hard into MB's unreliable narration without having him saying anything at all! And a great way to illustrate how melodramatic it is without actually coming out and saying that. But instead, since everything up to that point had not only come out and said things but hammered them in with rhetorical questions in case I was thinking of having any thoughts myself, my immediate assumption was that the writing team had bitten off more than they could chew. Like they'd gotten as far as "the Corporation Rim think these guys are holding hands and singing Kumbaya", but they couldn't think of a way to show that, so they just had PresAux literally hold hands and sing and thus look insane to the audience as well as to the in-universe characters.

I'm still not sure which of those two it actually was, but I know I only experienced the second one. I think the bottom line is that if the show can't trust me, I can't trust it either.

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movie scientist who's seen all the memes and overcorrects, only talking to non-scientists in simple english wikipedia words. eventually his gruff military boss sits him down and says "listen son, i don't have a phd but i did take some biology classes in undergrad, you're allowed to use the word 'ribosome' with me."