i learned about Tim Wong who successfully and singlehandedly repopulated the rare California Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly in San Francisco. In the past few years, he’s cultivated more than 200 pipevine plants (their only food source) and gives thousands of caterpillars to his local Botanical Garden (x)

Sometimes, people are really great.

This is also an example of picking One Thing and putting most of your Better The World efforts there. We have so many different important issues to care about and act toward, and it’s tempting to try and do a Little for Many Things - and I’m not saying that little bits of effort don’t add up! They do. But often you’ll make a bigger impact (and possibly have less compassion/activist fatigue) if you direct the majority of your efforts toward one or two things.

queen of the world to me

the Columbia University arrests are worse than they seem. They're arresting protesting students for trespassing. It goes without saying students cannot meaningfully "trespass" in the common areas of a university they attend. So Columbia University has suspended all student protestors from their institution, in the process revoking their access to housing, their belonging, and most crucially damaging their academic futures. We are witnessing full scale silencing and removal of anyone of conscience from the next generation of academia.

beyond that the columbia common is literally an open space during the day; the gates are open and it's possible to pass through it like you'd pass through a regular block. even after my student ID expired i was still able to walk through the commons bc ID is not requested until you enter an actual building. it's quite common to see parents, toddlers, and such who are clearly not enrolled just hanging out. so not only were the students not trespassing at a SCHOOL THEY PAY FOR, there was also not a precedent for non-students to be disallowed from the grass and walkways.

in my head the star wars equivalent of tswift is some human woman named tay’lor spiff or something and her stans are losing their minds over theories that she’s secretly a jedi singing about the horrors of war, even though she’s from a neutral system that hasn’t seen so much as a moral panic in 50 years

the theories get even more egregious during the imperial era, with people straight up thinking she joined the rebellion in secret and is loading her songs with subliminal rebel propaganda. their main piece of evidence for this is if you play a certain song backwards, it sounds like she’s saying “freedom” in shyriiwook. the fans get really defensive if you point out she’s performed at the yearly empire day celebration thrice now and her family historically owned ewok slaves

i regret to inform both you beautiful people that this isn’t going to go how you think it will

spiff fans (also known as “spiffies”) insist that the two decommissioned venator-class destroyers spiff purchased, the bad blood and the reputation, are for diplomatic purposes that benefit the rebellion. jedi’lors have concocted theories that she served on both ships during the clone wars and was respectful of every clone that served there, despite her courtship of a gravball player that thrice advocated against the clone veterans being granted natural citizenship

my cat is incredibly sweet and wants nothing more than to be within a 5 ft radius of a person at all times, gently chilling in your orbit. he is also VERY, VERY DUMB 

it’s a slow morning so husband and I are reading, not making much noise. meanwhile, Barold goes downstairs to use his box and when he comes out, he starts yowling like his lil heart done broke. husband goes to to the top of the stairs all worried like, “Barold, what’s wrong?”

kitty zips back up the stairs and just oozes onto husband’s feet, purring high-powered lawnmower style. the realization hit us both at the same time…

this. boy. this itty bitty kitty boy. 

he couldn’t see or hear us for ten continuous seconds, forgot. we. were. home. and immediately burst into tears !!!!

127k notes later

and I just wanted to update you that moments ago, this big orange infant found himself on the wrong side of a baby gate, could not hork his lorge butt over it, and so just started WAILING until everyone in the house came to rescue him. Me, my partner, the dog, our other cat… everyone came to be like, “Barold, what’s wrong?”

after this harrowing ordeal, he is now in my lap

You have to admire her audacity, if nothing else.

Literally my favourite thing about Rogue One is that it makes the opening of New Hope so funny. Like, Vader has followed Leia from a planet he just blew up seconds ago and pursued her across the galaxy and then she’s just like: ‘I’m on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan’

Vader: You’re a rebel. I just had a fight with your entire rebel fleet and followed you here. Straight from the rebels. Of which you are a part

Leia: *dramatic gasp* rebel? Me???  I was just passing through. Diplomatically. Thought it was a five-space-ship pile-up or something going on there… 

death star plans? on my alderaanian diplomatic mission? it’s more likely than you think

ok but this is like legitimate Canon Improvement because I’d always wondered why Vader was so wildly furious at the start of the movie like “rahhhhh bring me the passengers I WANT THEM ALIVE!!!!” and now I’m like

ohh yeah okay they literally JUST blew up Vader’s base, stole his sh!t, and took off while giving him the finger from the window

IT GOT BETTER

It is the best thing ever because it establishes that he knows she’s a Rebel and she knows he knows she’s a Rebel and he knows she knows he knows she’s a Rebel and—here’s the kicker—every moment she stalls him is another moment Artoo has to get the plans off the ship and head for Kenobi, and so she’s standing there all “Rebellion? What Rebellion? Me? *kicks dead Stormtrooper underneath carpet* I don’t know about any plans, have you checked behind the sofa?” and making Darth Vader’s blood pressure rise, and, oh, the best part of it is that she’s his daughter so guess where she got that sass from, like every fucking dead blue Force Ghost Jedi who got killed at the birth of the Empire is whooping and cheering from the Blue Force Ghost Afterlife seeing Anakin Skywalker get inflicted with everything they had to deal with from him.

You just know that enough people’s dying thoughts were, “I hope you have one just like you,” for the force to go, “this bitch deserves twins.”

It got better.

POV you made a popular post about insects

Something I really loved in Dungeon Meshi is the amount of research put into the monster biology with parallels to real-world biology, and i have to point this out in regards to the kraken.

Of course, many people consider squid to be delicious (I am one of them), but not all squids are the same. In the dungeon, it turned out, that of all the monsters they could find to eat, the kraken, theorized to be one of the tastier monsters out there, turned out to taste...absolutely awful.

As it turns out, giant squids in real life, well...

So there you have it. Kraken really DOES taste awful. Well-researched!

ALTSo there you have

it. Kraken really DOES taste

awful. Well-researched!

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

it's my opinion that "all hobbits are kind/brave/generous" is part of this infantilization I was talking about. even when characters in the story do it, with good intentions, it's very silly! no, hobbits are not inherently pure hearted like children, some are greedy, selfish, cruel, and this can be true of any thinking being!

bilbo goes back to his house being auctioned, family members rejecting his identity and then calling him mad for decades. frodo lost his parents and his fellow hobbits started making up stories of them killing each other. and then... SMEAGOL, c'mon man that's all the proof you need

if bilbo wasn't a hobbit but instead a dwarf, man or elf, huge parts of his character would be taken way more seriously

(rattling the bars of my enclousure) he's not naive he's not naive he's not naive he's not naive

it's a tendency to infantilize him, i think

like, taking real character traits and twisting them around. optimistic➡naive, reserved/observant➡overly shy, empathetic➡crybaby

[EXTREMELY LOUD CORRECT BUZZER]

Well as long as we’re talking about the ancient internet, who remembers this.

THE WAYBACK MACHINE STILL HAS IT

this post calling Robot Unicorn Attack ancient was made in 2014. Ten years ago from this reblog. This post is now ancient.

You know there was a famous Babylon king (you know, one of the oldest cities in the world) who was mocked relentlessly for being more interested in the archaeology of his own civilization than in ruling. He explored ruins from thousands of years before his time…. which was 2000BC

so this is pretty much that.

The song itself, Always by Erasure, is 30 years old as of April 11th.

isnt the world so beautiful....all the little ways we're immortal...71 million years later they still sleep like you

You, a heroic paladin have successfully slain a fearsome dragon. But the dragon warns you that death is but a door, and dragons don’t die, they reincarnate. You paid it no mind….until your son was born with golden, slitted eyes.

curious friends and family: hey why does your kid have golden eyes

paladin who for sure fucked the dragon instead of killing it, thinking fast: dragons uh. reincarnate. surprised you didn’t know about that. it’s a common fact that i definitely did not make up. no further questions

I cant believe this tweet is how I find out

now all the things you guys have told me about american high schools are starting to make sense

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

an article on the subject for the curious:

It's actually even wilder than the above description suggests: They didn't just avoid the bad chip, they can't. It's too important and it's not like they can go resolder the computer now.

They instead mapped out which parts of the memory chip are bad (about 3% of it), and rewrote all the code using that chip to avoid those sections. The probe is still using the bad chip! it's just only using the parts that haven't failed yet.

It's like having a car that was in an accident and can't turn right anymore, so instead of repairing it you just map out a new route to work that involves only left turns.

It's frankly amazing that they were able to do this, especially since all their diagnostics they ran to figure out which parts of the chip were bad HAD TO RUN ON THAT EXACT SAME CHIP.