Some Pop Teams I did. No rhyme or reason. Fittingly enough. More below the cut.

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Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it's just... Social media. That's it. Social media and news sites. And I'm tired of social media and I'm tired of the news.

Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?

Long collection of resources under the cut.

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)

maybe its bc i live in a place where forestry is one of the dominant industries but like tree planting rly isnt good. like the majority of the time its done by forestry companies to “offset” what they’ve cut down, and they almost always just plant fir & spruce monocrops and then they prevent the rest of the forest from naturally regenerating by spraying glyphosate, because they want to kill off the hardwoods that grow back since softwoods are worth more to the pulp industry… anything a company does that is supposedly “green” never is.

They aren’t actually replanting the forest, they’re building lumber farms in the middle of it and trying to pass them off as the same thing to people who think a forest is just trees because they live in a world mediated by images and have never been in an actual forest long enough to be able to tell healthy diverse growth from a struggling monocrop.

And unfortunately even choosing all the right trees and plants would not actually help either. Some naturalists I recall coined the term “ghost forest” to refer originally to “replanted” rainforests, in the same sense as “ghost town,” because it never brings back the same rich diversity of life or the healthy microbiome that took centuries to form.

And the average person doesn’t think about that at all, they don’t care that the layers of rotten leaves and insect colonies and mycelia are as much “the forest” as the presence of trees, and in fact the whole existence of that understory *is the actual benefit of the trees,* the actual reason the trees are important to all that wildlife. Companies are glad people don’t care about this, and as long as “replanting” is seen as a valid compromise, it means environmental regulations will continue to be lax and let them kill the majority of life in those habitats.

It’s the ecological equivalent of Weekend at Bernies. They made a corpse look alive enough that they aren’t being held accountable.

We don’t notice lichens, but we notice when they aren’t there. Maybe not with the forebrain, but with some other part. The part that recognizes the smell of birds and feel of wind that comes from the north vs the south and the sound of ants scurrying across leaf litter. You get this eerie sense of wrongness, of fakeness, of artificiality. You don’t know that it’s the lack of complex miniature macrocommunities that took hundreds of thousands of years to establish and grow and change and dye the trunks trees with their soft, pale markings or to ruffle the earth with their branching tufts, but you do. You don’t know that it’s the lack of early successional and late successional colonizers who you have seen in the foreground and background of nearly every environment you have been in–who have tinged the rocks and dusted the old stumps and curled around the ancient walls and clung to the branches overhead, but you do. You don’t know what you are missing, but you do notice they are missing. Something in you says “this isn’t a forest–it looks like a forest but it isn’t.” And I swear it’s not just the overly orderly rows or the uniformity of the trunk sizes or the lack of rotting earth smell. It’s the lichens. And believe me–it’s the lichens you’ll be missing when there’s no more real forest left. You won’t know it, but you’ll know.

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.

XKCD

So that people don’t need to go through the notes:

- We have fossils of spider webs

- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of

- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa

- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)

If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.

We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.

We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.

The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it’s colors, and it’s tail rings (which one would argue would be it’s “iconic feature.”

(Art credit Julio Lacerda)

Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.

(Art credit Vitor Silva)

This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We’ve found pigmentation in scales and skin. We’ve completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We’ve figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.

We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.

We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by “accident” by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.

We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it’s life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)

We learn and understand way more from “rocks” than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is “We can’t possibly know anything about these animals,” then you don’t understand science.

As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They’re only concerned with Awesombro.

If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as “proof” that paleontologists don’t know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)

Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of “thanks i hate it” and “stop ruining dinosaurs!”

Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health

@lusus–naturae​

@crystallinethoughts

You can find some fairly decent dinosaur sound reconstructions on YouTube. Based on how a Tyrannosaurus voice box and hearing worked, we can infer that it would have made low rumbling sounds instead of the iconic roars from the Jurassic Park franchise.

Something between the boom of a crocodile and the roll of thunder. It was a sound you would likely be able to feel, perhaps even before it was able to be heard. Far off thunder on a sunny day then the earth begins to shake and the thunder grows loud enough you can feel it in your stomach. That’s what it may have sounded like to be hunted by a T. rex.

So now that we have all the pieces of Project Voltage art, which one is your favorite? They're all really good, but I'm partial to the Flygon one personally!

"Because I am the Rose Bride, because I am a doll with no heart."

making all ur faves fat btw. die mad about it

"ohh but this character is an athlete/survives in the wild so it doesn't make sense!!!!" L + ratio + don't care + you have a very narrow understanding of how the human body works + thin =/= fit + fat representation matters more than any fragile feelings you may have regarding internalized fatphobia + learn to draw bodytypes other than skinny people + wizard BLAST

adding a bigger wizard to this because its fitting :3

[Credit: u/sampetersonart, r/DnD - http://www.sampetersonart.com, http://www.twitch.tv/sampetersonart, https://twitter.com/SamPetersonArt, http://www.instagram.com/sampetersonart, sampetersonart@gmail.com, commissions on r/fantasyartists - “Kal the Wizard”]

I’ve just learned of the existence of the website historyofhyrule dot com, and it has an incredible amount of rare Zelda art. And my favourite thing is how back then the artists of guidebooks and tie-in stories only had tiny sprites to work with, and as a result we have a whole bunch of versions of the characters.

you can log on and draw girls. it's allowed. encouraged, even

this episode aired in 1992

I will never again stop thinking about the fact that IT IS CANON

Mucus Buster

Everyone's got lingering congestion this year, so as someone who's no stranger to phlegm, and inherited the folk wisdom of a stage actress (the show must go on!) I share with you my recipe for making things better:

Bring the water to a boil then dump in all the stuff. Keep it hot but not boiling – a slow cooker is good for this. Keep this pot on a low heat all day and serve yourself a mug every so often, adding water as necessary. At some point you will need to add a new lemon and some more honey, but the spices can generally carry over two pots if you're drinking it regularly.

The acid helps clear the gunk, ginger is good for the circulation, and clove/aniseed/pepper have some sort of decongestant/soothing properties. Honey is both nice and antiseptic, and apparently is a cough suppressant as well? Anyway, I just got over another run of Covid and this was wasn't 100% effective but it worked better than phenylephrine.

hey, don’t cry. one half flour one half yogurt knead into dough and fry for easy flatbread and dip in balsamic vinegar, okay?

After three batches, my findings so far:

I’m gonna be eating these for a month

This actually works?? Two-ingredient bread??

I gotta try it.

That's...naan.

That's naan?

*runs to Google*

HOLY SHIT THAT IS NAAN! HOW DID I NOT KNOW NAAN WAS THAT EASY TO MAKE?

this is one of those rare easy bread recipes that also works with gluten free flour! the yoghurt helps with structural integrity. you may want a pinch of xanthan gum if your flour doesn't come with it mixed in. i like to mix some rosemary into the flour to have a herby naan, since i can't have garlic.

edited to add naan pic from 2020, gluten and lactose free version with rosemary. i rolled them out and then rubbed them with a tiny bit of oil iirc, before frying them in a dry pan

also a plain version i made while feeling unwell

probably a little overcooked but gluten-free stuff tends to take ages to cook or toast and then burns in seconds once it hits the threshold, plus my frying pan at the time was really shit lol

more detailed instructions/gf recipe here for those who need things broken down into steps