Crab fanblog

happy miku day to those who celebrate

Ashley Radjarame

Pooja Mor by Maya Skelton for Vogue Poland November 2021

hostile takeover. and um. it frew up

Speckled emperor moth, Gynanisa maja, Saturniidae

Found throughout southern and southeastern Africa

Photos 1-2 by suncana, 3-5 by jouberth, 6 by ambergreeff, 7 by jouberth, 8 by adshort, 9 (caterpillar) by suncana, and 10 by alexanderr

What if Pokémon from Scarlet and Violet were in previous generations?

Illustration for a wedding invitation (thanks and congratulations to the lovely couple!) 

One of the worst parts about unprincipled Western "environmentalism" is how it often dovetails with outright anti-intellectual and Luddite fearmongering about technology and development, which is how you get shit like people freaking out about GMOs mutating them or "unpronouncable ingredients" or treating "buying local" as some sort of talismanically good way of consumption. It's actually cool we have electricity and centralized production and drought-resistant crops and shit, what's not cool is the commodification and unsustainable growth of those things under capitalism and their unequal division between the imperial core and periphery.

Ivory spiky isopod, Laureola sp., Armadillidae

Captive bred by The Isopod Barracks, Olympia, Washington

The Isopod Barracks on Facebook // Instagram

Photos shared with permission; do not remove credit or re-post!

[image description: tweet by Netchimen’s Reverie that reads “Tolkien describing places that are evil: no trees grow there” /end description]

This is doubtless because of his experience of the trenches in the Great War.

Like, this is what things looked like to soldiers who fought in that war (image in black and white of a solitary soldier walking across a muddy wasteland pocked with puddles):

Here’s Delville Wood, the site of a battle in 1916 (sepia image of a wasteland dotted with broken and dead trees):

Here’s an image from the Battle of the Somme, in which Tolkien participated (image of soldiers standing above and inside a trench or earthwork in a grey wasteland; smoke from artillery is on the horizon)

So yeah: no trees = evil was Tolkien’s own direct lived experience. It’s precisely why Mordor and the wastelands around it look like they do in his books.

the plateau of gorgoroth, the heartland of mordor, is described as being scarred by countless pits dug by orcs the true seat of evil is full of foxholes and trenches

There’s a lesson to be learned here.

I hope Tolkien would be happy to learn that a hundred years on, trees grow again here:

From The Atlantic.

I think that Tolkien would be very happy to see that.

I had some fun asking ChatGPT about cases from "Counterexamples in Analysis." You get this kind of uncanny valley math, syntactically and stylistically correct but still wildly wrong.

This was a response to "Prove or disprove: there exists a nowhere continuous function whose absolute value is everywhere continuous." It responded in TeX, which I coped into a TeX editor.

Another answer to the same question:

the aber mountain rangers are actually full time ecologists and only part time emergency response crew. here they are doing a bat survey

Will you treat him gently with his bread soft carapace...? (...)

little cretaceous guys + guest appearance of our even older friend the gorgonpsid (triceratops, pteradon, carnotaurus, parasaurolophus, deinonychus, ichthyosaur, gorgonopsid, repenomamus)