Many Interesting Things

i beat myself up for not knowing enough about my special interests a lot but then i remember the average person off the street has no idea what the carboniferous is and i feel better

are you really bad at it or are you in "good at it" spaces

Me: ah shit, I misidentified that yellow rumped warbler as a female goldfinch, I should literally be hung at the gallows for this. I'm such an IDIOT

My friend, pointing at a vulture: check out that fucked up crow lol

The boss has arrived ...

IF YOU ARE IN NC AND YOU VOTED, CHECK IF YOUR NAME IS ON THIS LIST.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 decision that over 60,000 votes cast in last year’s closely contested state Supreme Court race must be verified and recounted. The ruling comes after Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin, who lost the race, challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of 2024 voters. Those voters will now have 15 days to verify their eligibility, potentially changing the outcome of the election. Check your name here: https://thegriffinlist.com

Ruling made April 4th, 2025. This is current.

Context:

my dad likes to call the stretches of time where you’re not creating “dreaming periods” and says that they’re meant to allow you to absorb all of the beauty, life, and inspiration from the things around you so that when you’re able to create again, you will have fanned your spark back into a flame. sometimes its hard to see those moments as anything but stagnation, but he always says that they’re natural and healthy and needed—things that should be embraced rather than feared.

reblog to give your headache to elon musk instead

I’d just like to point out the growth in this post has mostly coincided with elon’s public spiral downward and I’d like to think we’re all a small part of that

bro can’t think because he’s just got a rager of a migraine 24/7

yes I would like to give elon musk my menstrual pain. I think he deserves it

Reblog to also give Elon Musk your menstrual pain.

Do you think it would be too generous of me to also give him my crushing fatigue?

I will generously donate my chronic back pain (permanently somewhere between dull ache and 'knife stuck in back') and also my 'feel like a wrung out dishrag' fatigue and weakness

I will also give him my blighty hip that randomly feels like it's dislocated, and the jangly nerve in my right thumb that's annoying as fuck.

No refunds, no returns.

Hey students, here’s a pro tip: do not write an email to your prof while you’re seriously sick.

Signed, a person who somehow came up with “dear hello, I am sick and not sure if I’ll be alive to come tomorrow and I’m sorry, best slutantions, [name]”.

I mean, if someone wrote that to me, I’d probably believe they were sick.

“Slutantions” has me crying laughing

i once emailed my professor with a migraine. a mistake.

“I amsick will not to choir because i have a heache. i Hope its very and i am so sorry

love,

blue”

the subject line was “OW”

THE SUBJECT LINE IS THE BEST PART JSJFJSJDJS JUST IMAGINE GETTING AN EMAIL WITH NO CONTEXT OTHER THAN “OW”

As someone who has taught college, please send those emails because 1) We WILL believe that; no one would write that on purpose and 2) we need a laugh sometimes.

On the other side of this, once after getting taken to the ER by ambulance, I got an email from the professor whose class I’d passed out in, and the message had no text, just the subject line “you good?”

Reblogging for the last addition

Claritin makes me weird, but I have allergies so there’s about a month and a half block of time where I’m taking Claritin and am just weird most of the time.

Anyway, my last year of college, I got the flu or something in late March and was also taking Mucinex. I told my professor I couldn’t come to class one day by email except I couldnt think of what to say, so my medicated ass decided to make a Fry meme. I think it said something like “Not sure if I can go to class with a head the size of Texas, bottom text.” I didn’t think until the next day that it probably wasn’t socially-acceptable to tell your philosophy professor you weren’t coming to class via Tumblr style memes. When i got back to class, i found that she’d printed it out and taped it to the classroom bulletin board.

Oh shit you guys i turned on my WinXP laptop that I used to use back then.

IT WAS ON THE DESKTOP. THIS IS WHAT I SENT.

It’s even worse than i remember it

I laugh myself hoarse every time this post comes around, so here it is again.

Once emailed a professor from my hospital bed high on painkillers after a really bad car crash which my heart actually stopped the email “Dead cant class sory”

i was very sick over new years and one day i woke up to find i had emailed my manager in the middle of the night:

she said it was the most beautiful sick email she’s ever gotten

Once sent a relatively coherent email that started with:

“So I’m writing this from a hospital bed, right…”

Horror Musical Instrument

cut to me, playing my horror instrument at 4 am; my downstairs neighbors bang relentlessly at their ceiling with a broom stick, trying to stop me from summoning witches

Unmute!

Took me a couple years to get around to researching this, but it’s an instrument made by Morfbeats. Browsing the website, this instrument is possibly called Marvin, Mini Marvin, or Micro Marvin.

The good news is that everyone saying they want one potentially can get one, they are available for purchase as of this post.

The bad news is that they are very expensive.

Regardless, consider: Bard that plays one of these.

Mouse Armor by Jeff De Boer

I love his stated intention behind these projects, ‘Confuse historians’.

“Rayban charity glasses event” is a scam don’t click any link in a post that says that.

Old tumblr users remember this scam back when it first went out.

Also no, this isn’t a joke. This phishing scam is 100% running its course again so watch out for your mutuals long abandoned accounts suddenly posting it. Please make everyone aware of it since most users here are newbies who have not seen it before!

Wouldn’t it be cephalophlangi? Since fingers are phalanges, and pharynx is the throat

Ooooh yeah, that’s better as an accurate description - but no, it still needs the

How do we feel about cephalodactyl? And we can use phalanges for “phalangipod.” Cephalodactyl phalangipod. How do we feel about that

The Greek prefix for "hand" is "chiro", so perhaps it is a chirocephalic pentapod, or maybe a pentapodactyl cephalochiroid?

I like “pentapodactyl” tremendously!!! but hate “chiro” in this context, and I don’t know why. Obviously I have no authority to be the arbiter of this but I do feel strongly!!

There’s a gorgeous rhythm to:

Cephalopharyngeal pentapodactyl monstrosity of the alarm

@elodieunderglass I'm curious how you pronounce "Cephalopharyngeal" - my instinct is to pronounce the opening as a dactyl, like in "cephalopod", i.e. "SEF-uh-lo", but the scansion of that line feels better to me if it's an amphibrach, i.e. "suh-FAL-lo"

The Cephalobrachial Pentapodactylus! Palmate monstrosity of the alarm! The sesquipedalian's best pernoctalian psuedo-mammalian hand without arm!

This maniform, bursiform, digital deep-dweller drifts through the darkest demersal domains, A five-footed fingerling phantasm floating full fathoms afloor from the foam-freckled main!

It hunts with its quick hyponychial cnidocytes fully envenomed and ready to kill! If nocuous toxicants don't cause cessation its rostriform mandibles certainly will!

By ripping and rending, it ruptures its rations with razorlike radulae housed in its jaw; Its great glabrous grub-grippers gather the gobbets to go in its ventropharyngeal maw!

The Cephalobrachial Pentapodactylus seldom comes skyward while it's still alive, But sometimes some singular specimen surfaces, stalking the shore like a deadly high-five,

So if you should witness, in perambulation, gressorial fingertips roaming the sands, I beg you, consider this simple hortation: observe from a distance, and do not shake hands!

HELLO!!!

finally finished this little man after 2 years of art block lol! I lov u leaf dragon my childe

DELETE THIS POST

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

*clicks play in morbid curiosity*

*hammers reblog button*

I think I find this post every April Fools Day and I am so happy that I do

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

I can't stress enough how much I miss StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.

stumbleupon not existing anymore can be directly traced to a dramatic decline in my mental health, I could do a thesis on it.

bestie stumbleupon very much still exists its just called cloudhiker now. i use it all the time.

mini compilation of suggestions from the replies:

The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."

The Useless Web

Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)

Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."

Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."

my grandparents have to lock their car doors when they go to sunday mass because people have been breaking in to unlocked cars and leaving entire piles of zucchini

i feel like i should’ve added more context when i posted this. my grandparents live in a rural area where farmers and casual gardeners alike are, at this point in the year, suddenly being hit with unexpectedly abundant zucchini crops. there aren’t just some random vandals leaving zucchinis in people’s cars for the hell of it, this is the work of some very exasperated, probably very elderly, folks who have more zucchini than they know what to do with

Yep. You can also expect to find a bag of zucchini on your porch.

My grandfather once found his neighbor stealing his tomatoes out of his garden at three in the morning. Red-handed, with a basket of the nearly-ripened ones.  He thought he was going to find gophers or something, but no, here’s Henry, taking his tomatoes. The best ones.

There was a long pause between them.

My grandfather (allegedly) said, “Henry… it’s OK.  You can take some tomatoes if you want them.”

Henry sighed in relief.

“But,” my grandfather said, “you have to take two zucchini for every tomato.”

There was another long silence.  “That’s a harsh bargain, John,” said Henry.  “But I accept.  I’ll tell Joe up the street, too.”

My grandfather said, “Tell Joe he needs to take three.”

a friend of my dad’s came by in the middle of the night, he seemed very nervous when my dad answered the door. he wouldn’t come inside but he leaned in and whispered to my dad in spanish, “i have some fresh grapes for you.” and then this happened:

the melon was a special bonus.

MY DREAM

A friend of mine lives in a rural area and he has been surrounded by zucchini for most of May, June, and July.

At one point he was so done with the whole zucchini madness that he came to classes actively begging people to “Please please please!! Take some my family’s damned zucchini!! I’ve been eating zucchini for weeks!! I’m going insane!!!”

Having grown up in a rural area and having come home to zucchini on the front step or in the mailbox, i find it highly amusing the OP had to clarify.  I’m sitting here nodding “yup.”

I have a friend with a garden in Oregon who literally made Zucchini Chocolate Chip Cookies and sent them to me in Indiana. I texted her back “I SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING HERE”

I’m waiting for the day when someone will hear about my background in Botany and ask me for advice on what someone who’s just wanting to start exploring planting vegetables should try.

I know fuckall about gardening because my background is wild plants and not agriculture, but I’m gonna tell them

“Zucchini. Definitely try Zucchini. Just plant plenty of them and you’ll get a decent sized crop! They’re very rewarding to grow.”

It may be a bit of a long game, but I’ll enjoy their screams of despair from across the void as they realize that they will eat zucchini forever

This is NOT an exaggeration, guys. Zucchini (and most squashes, really) will outgrow you so fast. Let our tale be a caution– or an encouragement, whichever. You decide as you hear the story of Squish.

When we were so broke we had to choose between gas and store-bought-food (I think I was about 10?), we had a garden so we could eat regularly (we also had chickens and pigs and hunted, but that’s beside this point). One summer, we planted 6 rows of yellow squash and 6 rows of zucchini. Each row probably had 10, maybe 12 plants in it. We created this giant squash-block in our garden plot so it was all right there together in the middle, and the needier plants like tomatoes were on the outside of the whole plot. We thought we were clever, til the first crop started coming in.

The outside two rows of each squash, yellow and zucchini, were normal. High yield, of course (because squash), but standard size for both summer squash and Italian zucchini. The inner 8 rows, however, created this hybrid monstrosity that we called Squish. It was pretty– a nice swirly yellow and green combination that made it clear the squash and zucchini had interbred.

Squish became a living nightmare for us. Something about the hybridization caused them to forget how to stop growing, or at least how to grow at a normal rate because those suckers were longer than my dad’s forearm, and bigger around than my (albeit child-sized) thighs. They didn’t get all hard and nasty on the inside, either, for some reason, like most squash will at that size. And they just kept coming. I don’t even remember seeing that many flowers, but every day we were pulling upwards of 20lbs of Squish out of the garden, only for there to be more the next day, or sometimes by the end of the day if we harvested in the morning. I don’t know where they were hiding, but it was like some sort of squash portal had opened into our yard and started crapping out Frankenstein’s Squashes.

At first, it was great. We could eat all we wanted and not worry about rationing it. But the growing season in Arkansas is long, and we had incredible weather that summer, so those darn things kept alternating flowers and fruit. Pull off a few Squish, new flowers budded out, and they ripened super-fast in the heat. We were absolutely swimming in Squish, because they were so big that even gorging on them meant only 1 or 2 got eaten per meal. (I think I recall using a few particularly enormous ones as swords for a duel with my sister, if that says anything about their size. I cannot overemphasize how absolutely, heinously gigantic they were. You probably don’t believe me but I am not kidding. Those things were bigger than a newborn by several many inches and a couple pounds.)

We had (luckily) a big deep freezer, and someone gifted us a bunch of freezer ziploc bags, so we started chopping them up and freezing them as we pulled them off. We ran out of bags real fast, so we caved and bought a ton more. We filled that deep freezer near to bursting. It was probably 3-4 feet deep, (as I remember barely coming up to the edge of it), and at least 4-5 feet long, about 2.5 feet across, and we filled it to the top with Squish. And that’s while we’re eating fresh ones every day with dinner! But still more Squish came before the first frost, so we started packing the fridge. And my grandma’s freezer. And my grandma’s fridge. And feeding them to the pigs and chickens. And giving them away at church.

Do you realize how big a deal it is that people who were so broke that they had to choose between gas and the power bill were GIVING AWAY FOOD??? That’s how much gosh darn Squish we had. And little did I know, but apparently, my dad HATES squash. He only planted them because they were a cheap, quick source of food and my mom loved squashes. And he got stuck with the folly of his decisions. For over a year.

Yep. We had Squish in the freezer for over a year. Eating it regularly. It lasted for over a year. A family of 5, plus often feeding my grandmother, we ate off a single garden’s haul for over a year. Of just the Squish. I tell you, if we’d had a farmer’s market back then, that Squish could probably have single-handedly lifted us out of poverty. Well, maybe not, but you get the idea.

We never planted both again, probably because my dad would have combusted out of rage if he’d ever seen another Squish in his life. But man those were the days for thems of us what loved squash.

So survival tip: If you need an absolute crapton of food, plant you a row of yellow squash and a row of zucchini, and keep that pattern going for as many rows as you like. You too can drown in Squish and love it.

Oh wow.

The last story is well worth the read. It might be long but I found it absolutely delightful! Thank you for sharing your childhood Squish gardening adventures!

Meanwhile, people are starving to death.

Ands What do you expect poor rural farmers who just have excess zucchini to do about that exactly? Mail them to Africa?

I was just talking to a friend today about gardening and she said “I’ll plant zucchini for this project.”

“Oh dear… what’s your damage control plan?”

“Oh,” she said, intuiting what I meant. “Eating the blossoms. Love stuffed blossoms. Pumpkin, squash, zucchini. It keeps the crop down, and you get lots of mileage out of them. You keep a mixed crop that way, too. Plus, people don’t always welcome gifts of zucchini, but they find gifts of blossoms exciting.”

This struck me as absolutely game-changing.

My problem is that I legitimately love zucchini. “Lizard,” you ask, “why is that a problem? Just eat the zucchini!” The problem is that in the middle of the growing season, there will be a point where I physically can not consume enough zucchini to keep up with what the plants are producing. It does not matter how much I chop, freeze, fry, bake, etc– there will always be a point where I have more zucchini than I have time in the day to do something with that zucchini.

But eventually it runs out. Like summer, it’s as intense as it is fleeting and come November I want for some zucchini fried with onions. By January, when I’m planning out the spring garden, there’s always that thought, that voice of hubris whispering in my ear… “maybe I should grow more zucchini?”

Children, it is a trap.

It’s getting on planting season so this is your annual reminder to ignore the siren song of zucchini.

Yknow what I LOVE about the Star Trek fandom? It’s ANCIENT. I had a talk with a nice old lady at the old persons home that my great grandma is in and she noticed my Spock shirt and was like “oh I love that show I thought the premise was lovely” and you all know THE PREMISE is trekspeak for spirk and I was like “do you accept the premise because I do” and she looked at me with the eyes of someone who is reliving their otp moments and she said “the premise is all I wrote about, dear” and we just talked about spirk for a hella long time and I just love how age doesn’t matter in this fandom you can be ninety and still be the biggest spirk bitch ever how rad is that

I was today years old when I learned that particular euphemism

I was also today years old. Fandom codes man

Reblogging to spread knowledge about the Premise, because I absolutely love that bit of fandom, and I want to make sure that it survives. (and yay to everyone who is part of today’s 10,000!)