struggle with small talk? yea me too. Especially when I’m passing my landlord in the stairwell and need a quick cover so I don’t have to speak for more than 5 seconds.
Solution: the weather. Neurotypical people go feral for it.
To be clear, THIS is how nights of the future should be lit
This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.
orange and especially white lights deter bats and prevent them from reaching feeding grounds at nighttime. Please if you can, write to your local council and encourage red street lights!!!!
One thing that I am 100% convinced would send an alien into cardiac arrest is sweating.
It sounds stupid but think about it: apart from horses, humans are the only species on earth that can sweat so it’s not a far stretch to believe it would be incredibly rare in extraterrestrials as well.
Just imagine, one day the AC in the main engine room is broken and everyone starts panting like crazy because of the heat, but the human? Just keeps working like usual? It’s not like they aren’t affected by the heat at all, but they aren’t breathing quite as hard as the rest and everyone thinks ahh yes, humans must have extreme durability to heat coming from that death planet. And then. The human starts melting?!?? And suddenly everyone is panicking because their human is leaking all sorts of important nutrients, metals and water out of every pore - are they dying? Surely this cannot be normal!
And the human has to explain that, no they are perfectly healthy and yes it is actually just the human body’s way of cooling itself down and no they don’t think it’s “the coolest thing ever!!”, wait till it starts to smell!
ok so, in my senior year of high school, i was taking an advanced construction technology class, but because of covid, it was extremely limited, to the point of one of the assignments being “do something that involves one of these trades/skills” and on that list was stone working. i had recently acquired a dremel, and gotten a little practice engraving letters, and figured that i could finally make a runestone or a monolith type thing. the reason i chose do specifically make it about the Fitness Gram Pacer Test was because at the time i was watching a lot of Overly Sarcastic Productions videos, and one of them (the quetzalcoatl one i think) mentioned how nobody would carve a monolith describing the Fitness Gram Pacer Test. i took this as a challenge, and also thought it would be very funny thing to do, and a great use of covid time. so about a week later, i had learnt elder fuþark, acquired a 26x26x2” slab of sandstone (approx 52 lbs.), freehanded a design based on a few different real world runestones, and carved out all the runes to describe the trial of Pæsjir, ringing serpent of endurance, a giant snake that serpentines across a 20m field in pursuit of the test taker, ringing a bell each time it turns around, and progressively increasing in speed until the participant either escapes, or is swallowed, sending the beast into a state of lethargy until another sacrifice must be provided. and then i spent the next week and a half painting it. it currently leans against the back of my parents’ house to get free weathering, and also because my parents don’t want it inside.
also have been kicking around the idea of maybe doing custom carvings…
You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.
For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:
Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning
Don’t fuck with flamingos
….. Didn’t know most of that
Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.
Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.
American flamingos just drink that shit
(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.
When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.
It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:
Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.
requested by anonymous:
RATING:RELIABLE
Flamingos can survive in high altitudes, hypersaline conditions, and caustic lakes.
Source: ‘All flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet’s most extreme wetlands, like caustic “soda lakes”, hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.’
They can survive water so alkaline it burns human skin.
Source: ‘More than a million lesser flamingos breed in Tanzania’s Lake Natron, for instance, a lake fed by hot springs with water so alkaline that it can strip away human skin (one pioneering flamingo researcher named Leslie Brown spent months in Nairobi General Hospital after burning his legs wading out to observe where the birds nested).’
They can drink water at near-boiling temperatures.
Source: ‘They can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity.’
The lakes they inhabit can freeze overnight, and the flamingos can survive once it thaws in the morning.
Source: ‘The birds may seem to epitomize the tropics, but they also live in the Andes, 15,000 feet above sea level, where they rest on lakes that freeze around them overnight.
“You’ll see them sitting there like snowballs, frozen on ice,” Dr. Arengo said. “And as the temperature warms up, they thaw out, fluff themselves up and go about their business.”’
The photo is indeed from Lake Natron, taken by photographer Nick Brandt. The content of the lake chemically preserves animal corpses that die there. You can see more photos of this here.
It is also true that 75% of Lesser Flamingos are hatches on Lake Natron.
Source: ‘The lake’s landscape is surreal and deadly—and made even more bizarre by the fact that it’s the place where nearly 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingos are born.’
Some species of Flamingo eat cyanobacteria or algae.
Source: ‘Flamingos have very specialised diets. And their food is responsible for their famous pink colouration. The two species in Planet Earth II eat a lot of floating microscopic algae, which contains carotenoid pigments, the same types of chemical that make carrots orange. These pigments turn their feathers pink, orange and red – without them, flamingos would be white.’
This is the most important thing I’ve learned about grieving. It never goes away. Time doesn’t make it smaller. Time, if you do the work, makes you bigger. Self expansion is key. Self expansion through creativity and passion and communication. My grief used to be all of me. Now it is a part of me. An important part, but just a part. I love this visualization so much.
She’s been defending the Earth since the early 90s and she’s very tired.
My name is Tominaga Haruka. I was chosen by a magical talking animal, and for the last 29 years I’ve been Earth’s one and only… Wonder-Sparkle Princess.
she’s been fighting the same villains for three decades and they are also tired of it. Most of them aren’t giving it their all. Half of them are in a groupchat they’ve added her to where they schedule their evil plans to make sure they don’t interfere with each other, or more importantly, with *her*
Xalkrax the space demon from outer space decided to attack the city when she was taking her vacation time once, and now he’s dead, because even the power of friendship and redemption can’t save you if you interrupt her rare vacations
Demon Queen Eluria: Gonna fill the city people’s hearts with hatred on thursday to cause mayhem and discord.
Wonder-Sparkle Princess: Can’t, got a PTA meeting.
Demon Queen Eluria: Friday?
Wonder-Sparkle Princess: A birthday party.
Demon Queen Eluria: Damn. How about I fill just the mayor’s heart with hatred then?
Wonder-Sparkle Princess: That’d be redundant, lol. Maybe fill his heart with a desire to fix the fucking potholes?!
Demon Queen Eluria: LMFAO love you, bitch. Stay strong.
Wonder-Sparkle Princess: You too, gurl. How’s the husband? Still dead?
Demon Queen Eluria: Yep. Thanks for that, btw.
Wonder-Sparkle Princess: Don’t mess with my time off :p
Why are people tagging this ’#wonder sparkle princess’ like that’s a thing and not a name I made up exclusively for this post?
Congratulations on inventing a new tumblr deity!!
I have some excellent news insofar as one of the best working authors recently went down a similar road and it’s amazing:
