ethereal, almost ghostly

she allegoried on my cave til i [JOKE PENDING]

brutalist candy cane

absolutely criminal how falling into bad habits is the easiest thing in the world while developing positive habits feels like fighting a literal war

why don't people in zombie apocalypse stories ever just wear suits of armor? you think any zombie is gonna get their shitty rotting jaws through this?

I'm gonna rip and tear my way through the zombie apocalypse completely unharmed because none of the undead hoards will be able to get through my plate mail

everyone else is like "oh we gotta stay inside the most secure places possible and never leave" and I'll be storming through the wastelands in my bloodstained suit of armor, blasting the Doom (2016) OST and plowing my way through waves of the undead. one of them tries to bite me but his shitty rotting teeth don't even leave a dent in my armor before I turn his head into paste. I'll be unstoppable until I die of dehydration or something like an idiot

this goes along with my other pet peeve about zombie apocalypse stories, namely: why does no one ever think to ride a bike? 

bikes are quiet- if the zombies react to loud noises, they won’t hear you on a bike the way they might hear you in a car. bikes don’t need gas, meaning you won’t be stranded if you run out. bikes are much, much easier to maintain than a car- there’s no computer that can short out, no fiddly engine bits that could kill you if you mess with them wrong. you can learn how to maintain a bike with a couple weeks’ worth of classes. almost every adult knows how to ride a bike, and without cars on the road, it’d be much safer to do. 

what i’m saying is

American author Mark Twain (b. 1835) lurches from his grave only to give you a massive thumbs up and die again

Mark Twain essentially invented the genre of a bystander sent into a time-travel sci-fi plot just to get someone to draw this image for him. And today we can simply search for such a picture. It is a time of wonders

#this post has everything. zombies. knights. bicycles. knights on bicycles. mark twain.

pov: you, armored, sneaking past the zombies on your bike

Reblog to give prev a magical amulet that protects them from headache

Reblog if it’s ok for your mutuals to tag you in posts they think you’ll like even if you don’t talk often.

Book club paintings vol. 2 ♡ Reading (2004) by Vladimir Gusev / Deliciosa soledad (1909) by Frank Bramley

Pushkinskaya Street 1975

Odessa, Ukraine

does it indicate anything about me that I immediately recognized what paper this figure is from

so I had to immediately go and pull this other amazing figure from the paper, which is "THE HEXAGON" a device with six rooms for fruit flies to have sex in and a central room for a fruit fly to observe six couples having sex at once

Is the goal to see if being able to observe multiple options simultaneously effects the watching flies' choices?

hello, thank you for asking, I was basically sitting over here vibrating hoping for the opportunity to infodump more

so the things about making decisions is that it takes a bunch of time and energy and brain power to gather and assess information, and it is evolutionarily advantageous to cheat and offload as much of the work as possible onto other people. thus, there is natural selection for observing other people's decisions and mimicking them.

in a lot of critters, this means it is advantageous to watch who someone else picks for sex so you can copy what they decided was sexy when you select your own partner

the simplest version of the fly sex panopticon is basically just a 2-chamber tube where scientists can orchestrate sex shows for fruit flies.

("watch a demonstration" is scientist code for watch anorthern pair of fruit flies have sex)

you can very quickly instill a preference: cover male fruit flies with pink or green fluorescent powder, and then let a female fly observe another female fly having sex with a pink male. the observer will conclude that pink is extremely sexy and be much more likely to select a hot pink male herself. by switching the colors and the learned preference to green, you can demonstrate that this is indeed learned behavior, and not some kind of pre-existing genetic preference.

the 6-way "sexagon" was invented for this paper to test how seeing different ratios of pink vs. green males being chosen would affect the development of preference.

the cool thing about this graph is it shows it didn't matter if there were only slightly more of the the females picking pink or green males, the observer would still develop a preference for whatever the majority were choosing.

the whole paper is very cool, and absolutely worth a read:

it argues (and supports experimentally) that since preferences can be learned and passed on, fruit flies have an actual culture that can vary among populations and be transmitted to youngsters across generations.

this is super cool, because most studies proposing or examining the existence of culture in animals have been focused on higher level stuff like monkeys. if something as simple as a fruit fly can have a culture, this suggests that animal culture could have had huge effects on evolution from the ground up.

so yes, animal culture! fruit fly culture! very cool

but also an excellent evolutionary argument for voyeurism

within fifteen minutes i have found two different grown adult men who have dating app profiles that say their worst fear is:

werewolves.

one was funny. two is like... hang on, do we actually have a werewolf problem in this town?

jesus christ I just found a third guy who's afraid of werewolves. what the fuck is happening here

Mothra and Godzilla. I'm obsessed.

When do you think cavemen figured out that you need a flared base for safe anal insertion? Can you imagine being the very first person to have that problem???

"What happen?"

"Thag fall on it 😶"

finally unlocking the real untold story of thagomizer

THAG, NO 😱😱😱😱

For the purposes of this poll please just stick to birth names! I'd like to do another poll for names people chose themselves later in life.

By LabradoriteKing on Pinterest

A handy guide for your Jewellers and Gem Cutters.

I accept payment in trillion-cut black diamonds.

Chop chop.

Useful!