when u think about his soulful brown eyes…

him

[ID: a photo of a glaborous fan lobster; a type of slipper lobster that is off white with many red dots, giving its body a pink hue. it has circular brown eyes. end ID]

i’m so glad this post is reaching the marine animals enthusiasts and i’m getting tags adoring this little guy bc i had to sit through a LOT of “ewwww i hate this!!!” for so many years…. thank you for loving him

AWWWWWW!

Polite boy

This sweet little beastie is cuter than any Pokémon I’ve ever seen.

Ever since seeing this meme...

...I haven't been able to get the idea out of my head.

So with much ado, behold:

My magnum opus of wargaming terrain.

sea butterflies, Limacina helicina (Gastropoda: Limacinidae)

source

It's hard to see here... but sea butterflies are a kind of snail

if anyone’s wondering, threads is still the most insufferable social platform in existence

doing some clean lineart on Malygos's redesign now...

So many scales Dx

“When you’re mean to me this is who ur being mean to” meme with Sanrio characters and small kitten is overused. Trite. It’s done I can’t relate. When ur mean to me this is who you’re being mean to:

Throwback thursday to when I was like 12 and I was putting out new writing DAILY...... Like entire Chapters of my then-current wips just, over an afternoon. What the fuck was I on

Nobody:

Me, age 12, just started drinking coffee:

I drew 14 pictures during the day, and wrote 32 pages a night. Now I can’t do shit.

A huge part of this is because you've gotten better! And now, when you're drawing/writing/doing whatever creative task, you're not just mindlessly throwing thoughts at your paper, you're thinking as you do it. Children can churn out a lot more work because it's not yet refined, but when you're older and have more practice, you work with all these thoughts running through your head about form and shape, color palettes or word choice. Now, you're making a dozen decisions with every moment of work, and you're also questioning the decisions you've just made, wondering if you can do it better. Don't beat yourself up about producing less work now than you did back then, because every sentence or shape involves a lot more effort for you now, than it did when you were ten and brand new to this hobby.

Also you have a job now and the never-ending bullshit that is laundry and dishes and feeding yourself.

okay, I actually really needed to hear this

I'm finally allowed to share this beast, the Wandering Ward, a type of Memory Keeper! I got to create them alongside @/goobsimar (on bsky), where he did the writing and I did the illustration. The project this was made for, Fen's Guide to Myriad Realms, is a 5e supplement made by +80 writers and artists to promote human made art- If that's something you're interested in, check our Kickstarter out, we're already halfways funded!

reminder that you can just change how you draw. you can. you dont have to have your current style forever if you dont like it. you can literally just change it and its free. are you listening to me

the thing is that childhood doesn't just end when you turn 18 or when you turn 21. it's going to end dozens of times over. your childhood pet will die. actors you loved in movies you watched as a kid will die. your grandparents will die, and then your parents will die. it's going to end dozens and dozens of times and all you can do is let it. all you can do is stand in the middle of the grocery store and stare at freezers full of microwave pizza because you've suddenly been seized by the memory of what it felt like to have a pizza party on the last day of school before summer break. which is another ending in and of itself

<3

Hey, you know that thing at the end of Inside Out where the blue memory mixes with the yellow memory?

Get used to that. It's gonna happen a lot.

Incredibly fucked up that flowering plants weren’t really a thing until the Cretaceous.

Think about it. We had all of these huge, big-brained vertebrates well before we had grass

Stegosaurus never ate fruit because fruit didn’t exist yet

I know in my heart he would have fucking loved berries

Thankfully, some stegosaurians lived until the mid-Cretaceous!

Hopefully one of them had the opportunity to try berries... 🥺

y'all know one of the favored hypotheses for stegosaur extinction is that they were so adapted for eating cycads that the rise of angiosperms caused their decline? like it's correlation at this point but in paleo that's often all we got

the point being, I really don't think stegosaurs would enjoy berries. it's entirely possible berries would poison stegosaurs

Crazy to think a whole scientific study is based on some bones and some random plant fossils and complete made up wild ass guess theories

it's actually based on parsimony and total evidence analysis as well as phylogenetic computation and ecological modeling, but I'm too busy doing all of those fucking things all the time to explain it in detail to random internet strangers

"made up wild ass guess theories" you are aware that all science starts with these. they're called hypotheses. they're then tested. in paleo, we test them with old bones and circumstantial evidence. but they're still tested.

one of the best supported theories - which, in science, means a hypothesis that has been repeatedly supported and refined with evidence - in science is only known because of paleontology (evolution). We know more about evolution than gravity. By a lot. Because of paleo.

I try to not get into internet arguments anymore bc they're all for the sake of folly but idk how you expected to insult my field in my notes and not be argued with lololololololol

We date the rocks because of the bones found in them and we date the bones because of the rocks we found them in. Sounds pretty circular to me. Carbon dating is not that accurate when used on extended time lines.

Please tell me about the dinosaurs found with skin and fatty tissue still attached that somehow survived from the cretaceous that was supposedly 100 million years ago.

it's not circular, actually. We date the rocks using the decay of the elements found inside them, which go through radioactive decay at a specific rate (known as a half-life). We then date fossils using those dates.

We used to figure out how old fossils were relative to one another - meaning, by the principle "old things get buried under new things" (which you can see in the pile of laundry in your living room), we can figure out that taxon A comes before taxon B because it is deeper in the rock record. The use of radioactive dating allows us to assign a specific time to those rock layers we can correlate.

The skin and fatty tissue have been mineralized like other fossils, they aren't actually soft tissue. While some proteins are able to survive and have been analyzed, most other biomolecules cannot. In fact, we don't have examples of ancient DNA older than the Quaternary iirc (not my specific subfield, but @raptorcivilization would know)

you think there are a million holes in this field because you don't know anything about it but apparently terrible anti-science propaganda. I recommend reading some books by people who know what they're talking about. But I'm officially done explaining this to you, because I legitimately have better things to do with my time. Bye.

Is this anything

Absolutely amazing how AO3 is a part of the internet that doesn't sneak in any ads and doesn't have an algorithm and doesn't watch you or record how much time you spend looking at each fic or whatever. It's just right there to use for free. Legend

The internet was like this. This was the normal.

this is because it's a non-profit! Remember this next time you bitch about ao3 asking for donations.

Re: littlecofiegirl's comment — actually, the internet was never like this.

"YouTube used to be free." Youtube used to be funded by venture capitalists. It operated at a loss for many years, until it grew a dedicated enough customer base to start stage 2 of the enshittification process.

It's the same business model as Amazon or Uber. Venture capitalists pour money into a business, allowing it to operate at a loss and undersell its competition until all the competition dies out and it becomes a monopoly. Once that happens, the business can hike up prices as high as it wants, secure in the knowledge that customers have nowhere else to go.

These websites were never free. They were always accruing debt, with the intention of eventually coercing the public into paying off that debt a hundredfold.

AO3 is not a relic of the old internet. It is a new kind of website created specifically in reaction to the enshittification of the corporate internet, by a community of people who believed that creative works deserved to flourish on the internet, on a platform that was not subject to the whims of corporate oversight, so much so that they were willing to donate money and labor to create such a platform.

If you want to compare AO3 to something, compare it to a website like Bluesky, which was created in reaction to the enshittification of Twitter X.

Do not glorify "the good old days" that never existed. You don't make the internet or the world better by going back to the way things were. You do it by building something new.

what no, the internet was absolutely like this "Youtube used to be funded by venture capitalists"? shut up

YOUTUBE might have but you're like half a dozen years too late for things like http://amasci.com which was the coolest damn website to me in the 90s

Stop thinking that the entire internet was paid for by venture capitalists, a lot of the cool shit on the internet was just paid for by dudes who were into a thing

The fact that that people think it was all venture capital means we need a SECOND dot com bust