ACT UP, 1990
A reminder that we've been fighting for a long time. For all y'all asking why it is in black and white; 1990. This was print media, not on a screen. Printing in color was expensive, and newspapers were all black and white.
The president in this case is Bush #1.
Is this a horrible thing with legs or...a horrible thing with fingers? Or just a horrible thing?
That’s cephalopharyngeal, a word which ought to help. Thank you so much for thinking of me!
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!!!
@dr-otter this made me think of you
One half of my brain:
If it has cnidocytes, then it must be a cnidarian (maybe scyphozoa?) rather than a mollusc or a primate? Or possibly it's a mollusc that eats cnidarians and steals the cnidocytes like a nudibranch, and that's why it has a radula. The thumb is obviously convergent evolution.
The other half of my brain:
WHAT IN THE ELDEN RING HORROR
lets settle this properly
the fucked up thing? I'd call that a chicken burger, but I'd say it is not at all a burger.
yeah it's like how i'm a north american, but i'm not an american. the suffix 'burger' has been used as slang for one specific thing on its own so extensively that it's monopolized the term without additional qualifiers.
Yeah, that's a chicken sandwich. A "chicken burger" is a bun sandwich with an unbreaded patty made of ground chicken. If you bread and fry the patty, it stops being a burger. A breaded and fried ground beef patty on a bun is a chicken-fried-steak sandwich. If you dress it up with standard burger toppings, you can /maybe/ call it a burger, but I'll give you side eye the whole time.
A burger must have a ground meat patty on a bun. You can change the meat type, and the toppings, but it must be a patty of ground meat on a bun.
✨Veggie Burger✨
Ingredients can be tvp, beans, mushrooms, etc.
I agree it must be a ground patty on a bun, but there are plenty that aren't meat. They are inferior (some are pretty good, but I've never tasted one that was as good as the best beef burgers), but they are still burgers.
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg called the Trump White House's bluff, and published all the explosive details (paywall) about a private Signal group chat that, contrary to administration LIES, did indeed contain sensitive military strike plans.
They called him a liar. He posted the receipts.
Shit is flying.
an article from PBS that only has a snippet, but is not paywalled
Edit: here's MSN, which has more details
I'm really glad they unpaywalled it.
It is a HELL of a read. There are screenshots!
The comments over at the Fox News site, of all places, are overwhelmingly upset and angry at Hegseth & Co. I fully expected to see them supporting the "it wasn't a war plan" lie, but they are laying into Trump White House staff.
This makes Watergate look like a kid accidentally telling mom what dad got her for Christmas.
Daring Fireball's latest today shares an observation from Hannah Arendt about how the ranks of authoritarian governments inevitably wind up being filled with “crackpots and fools” because they’re the people whose loyalty is most assured:
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
The Fireball article goes on to say: "When The Atlantic’s initial story hit, everyone responsible in the Trump administration, right up to the president himself, just immediately began telling bald-faced lies about what happened, despite the fact that they knew Jeffrey Goldberg literally had the receipts to prove otherwise. That works, until it doesn’t."
It may seem obvious and not worth mentioning, but apparently it is.
Unpaywalled version of the article with screenshots of the chat in question here.
I don't think this one's going to disappear in two weeks.
We’re otterly excited to announce that, in the coming weeks, we’ll welcome a brand new resident sea otter to the Aquarium’s raft!
Our newest otter was found stranded as a pup near San Luis Obispo, 100 miles south of Monterey. After being deemed unreleasable by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, she’s spent the past year behind the scenes getting used to her new home at Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Our team is busy preparing for her to join Ruby, Ivy, and Selka on exhibit. But there’s just one thing missing—she still needs a name!
Teaching a resident otter to recognize her own name is an important part of her training, so we narrowed it down to three unique choices:
💙Hazel 💙Opal 💙Quinn
Starting this Wednesday, March 26 at 12 p.m. PST, check out our socials for a link to the poll. You’ll have 24 hours to vote and help name our new exhibit otter.
We can’t wait for you to meet her!
#otters
This looks just like the sky in Wasteland
The incompetence of the Trump regime was on full display this week as top U.S. defense and intelligence officials shared planned military airstrike plans on a messaging app with a journalist from The Atlantic. This is a threat to national security and endangers the entire country. But if we didn't laugh, we'd cry.
Gosh I hate grind culture. My little sister just started medical school and all of her orientation leaders are like “you absolutely cannot have a life WHATsoever you WILL have to give up EVERYTHING besides this program say GOODBYE to your hobbies and relationships” and now she’s calling me feeling guilty for running and going to the grocery store and that’s just WRONG! And that is exactly what I was told starting law school as well, and rejecting that mentality was the best thing I ever did but it was so hard not to buy into. Anyway if any of you are in an intense academic program PLEASE take time to sleep and eat and exercise and maintain your relationships and keep up your hobbies! you are not a robot who exists solely to study and I promise that living a life and staying physically and mentally healthy is not going to make you fail
Workaholism is not just a “millennial quirk”, it’s a very real psychological problem that should not be normalized and praised. Diligence and self-realization? Awesome!!! Working so much you forget to eat, sleep and socialize? Not okay under any circumstances.
We got the exact same lecture at the start of vet school. I was told that only 25% of relationships survive through vet school and we wouldn't have time for anything else.
I did stop drawing and making art at some point along there. I'm only just now starting again with the XP pen tablet I got for Christmas. It feels really good.
It doesn't stop with vet/med school; after you graduate you're expected to give everything to your job, this isn't a career it's a calling, it's your whole life, you can't be anything else if you really want to be a doctor. And then people wonder why these professions have high suicide rates?
Please don't buy that attitude. You are a whole person, not a medical hologram. Nurture your relationships, start new hobbies, live your whole entire life.
Disaster bisexual sounds like a necessary role in the world. Needs to be introduced at the next FEMA quarterly and integrated into the incident command structure imo
The funniest thing about this is that I have been looking into the training to do this at the state level. Well, not precisely as a bisexual as such: as part of the emergency veterinary medical corps.
This is an extremely concerning situation, but finally we have a journalist who isn't afraid to ask real questions and push for answers, so that when Edgar does not answer it is very clear that he's refusing or unable to do so.
Khalil, to be clear, is a legal permanent resident with a green card, married to a US citizen. He was arrested, taken out of his home state to Louisiana and his family and lawyers were not told where he was for days. He is being held with no clear charge other than "aligned with a terrorist group", and the administration keeps insisting, falsely, that he is here under a student visa.
This is a test case. If Kahlil can be imprisoned and deported for his speech then anyone can. Michael asks repeatedly if criticizing the government is a prosecutable offense now and Edgar will not say that it isn't.
there is something to be said for going to zoos and aquariums on weekdays to avoid school-aged crowds but going to the aviary on a weekend is fun because going into big greenhouses and watching toddlers who just learned to walk encounter loose tropical animals taller than they are is part of the overall experience for me.
to me a three year old is just as much an entertaining and strange beast as an egret. and here they can interact directly. incredible.
listening to a macaw say “peekaboo” at a preschooler who takes it at face value that some birds must be completely fluent in English and no one has bothered to mention this before. unmatched
So my neighbor's three-year-old saw Charlie for the first time last week.
I don't see my neighbors often because they are Morning People (TM) and both our households are acting like the pandemic is still on (it is), but yesterday I happened to be taking Charlie out for a walk when they were coming home from something, and the kid "Checkers" was dumbstruck.
Charlie isn't a Big-big dog, but he is 60lbs and mostly leggy sighthound, so he is significantly taller than the average toddler. Since Checkers' extended family is largely allergic to mammals, they do not see dogs at other people's houses nor at daycare, so this was the fist time they've seen an animal larger than they are up close.
It is a beautiful thing to see a young human experience a sudden and profound shift in their worldview, and you get to witness parts of their brain being rewired in real time across their face. Confusion, then wonder as a fascinating new category of life opened before them. It is doubly wonderful that small children are rarely frightened of things unless they are taught to be, so, cautiously, Checkers approached Charlie, looking between us and making interrogative noises at me, as I was clearly his parent, and therefore responsible for introductions.
"This is Charlie!" I say. "He might or might not say hi back."
Checkers considered the evidence before them: Charlie has a name shared with their playmates, their older sibling is largely nonverbal, and Charlie wears a chest harness with leash, again like some of their playmates, and came to the extremely reasonable conclusion that Charlie is a fellow Human Child, and introduced themselves appropriately:
"Hullo." Said Checkers, stepping up to Charlie. "This is Bionicles." they continued, holding up their plush giraffe toy, the appropriate way to introduce yourself and your friends/interests to a new peer at age 3.
Charlie has a vast preference of humans to other dogs, and of adults to children within humans, often ignoring or evading small children the way he does with dogs that annoy him. It makes sense- small children are not usually the ones with treats, and typically inept petters at best. But something about Bionicles the Giraffe intrigued him and he politely sniffed and listened to Checkers talk about (I'm not sure because I have Audio Processing Problems and Checkers doesn't enunciate much) for a for about a minute, and I got to witness Checkers' parents undergo a similar world-shift as they realized Checkers was addressing Charlie as a fellow human, and how that was entirely rational of them.
The confusion on the adult humans was so interesting that I failed to notice Charlie very delicately taking Bionicles The Giraffe from Checkers until he had taken two steps to give himself room, and then started to Death-Shake the toy, because Charlie ALSO loves plushies, just in a very destructive sense.
I am horrified. The parents are Horrified. Checkers is DELIGHTED, laughing as Charlie very expertly separated Bionicles' head from the rest of the toy, and sat down in the grass to pull the fluff out.
I retrieved both pieces of the toy from Charlie, apologized profusely, took him home, and then came back to sew Bionicles' head back on.
Yesterday I saw Checkers on all fours out in the front yard, trying to re-decapitate Bionicles with their teeth while their father looked on, resigned. We have arranged a future playdate between Charlie and Checkers, with a handful of dollar-store stuffed toys for them to destroy together.
I think it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
