A thing I love to do is telling prepper dudes that one of my disaster readiness skills is making stuffed animals. They never get it. Like, my dude, when things get very bad and we're all sharing overcrowded shelters, you're gonna want the power to comfort children. Trust me.

You know what, I got a whole bunch of fabric / old clothes at home and no idea what to do with it. I might just learn how to do this too

Then you might be interested in a database with hundreds of free plushie sewing patterns of just about any animal, as well as dinosaurs, pokemon, etc: https://craftresource.fandom.com/wiki/Plushie_Sewing_Patterns

& If that's a little overwhelming, here's some easy beginners plushies: - Manta Ray https://cholyknight.com/2021/05/14/manta-ray-plush/ - Whale https://craftresource.fandom.com/wiki/Whale_Plushie_Sewing_Pattern_(Lacey) - Simple dino: https://welivedhappilyeverafter.com/diy-long-neck-dino/

and a little more chalenging but my personal favorite: - totally not that one shark from a Swedish furniture chain store that everyone loves: https://freesewing.org/docs/designs/hi

no your honor I absolutely can make my case like an adult. first things first, fuck the defendant and fuck his family too. secondly,

what do you meaaaaaaan this is baby sturgeons youre lying to me.... you just Shrunk him

Baby lake sturgeon!

I highly recommend them!

Sturgeon are my favorite animal and I think they are the most majestic and regal and beautiful animals on the planet but. The babys.,

I’ve searched high and low for the wonderful original post because this is amazing and deserves to be rebloged but I hope this is good enough. As thundercrumbs said GET OFF THAT MANS FACE!

@plaguedocboi

has @markscherz seen this one yet

Yup, in fact I know Brian, and this captures his essence pretty well.

EDIT: I just rebagled the original post here.

#Dr Fisher is an ant expert and works in Madagascar#and has developed the most amazing team there#he has helped me solve quite a number of problems and has some amazing connections

I assume the problems are stuff like “How do I drive down this road without being mugged” or “how do I smuggle this piece of delicate equipment without it being stolen by customs officer” and not, say, “Why the hell are ants the size of tarantulas eating all my frog specimens”

One of the problems that he helped me solve cannot be disclosed, although it would make an excellent chapter of a Durrell-style travelogue. But he did once lend us a generator for an expedition, which honestly saved the whole trip. But now you mention it, I do wish I knew which ants kept eating the frogs and skinks in our pitfall traps, and how to avoid them.

thank you tuoi tre news this is the funniest way you can post this

sentenced to #death

Ohhh my God, the current VA for Foghorn Leghorn actually dubbed it.

I need people to stop blaming the death of movies on “quips”. A quip is just a funny line of dialogue. That’s all. Like I just saw a post talking about quips and the death of movies and brought up Pirates of the Caribbean as an example of a better movie and yes it is but also that movie is FULL OF QUIPS. I just rewatched The Princess Bride. It’s all quips. Every single line. And it’s a masterpiece.

Movies suck when people don’t care about the art they’re making. That includes them not caring about their quips. Which is why a lot of comic relief dialogue ALSO sucks now. But the problem isn’t that funny dialogue exists.

#it’s not the quips it’s the complete and utter fear of showing any kind of sincerity#honestly it’s almost the equivalent of saying ‘no homo’ after a moment of being genuine

The Princess Bride is almost all quips, but it’s all sincerity. Every aspect of the plot is ridiculous and yet no movie dialogue has ever gone as hard as “I want my father back, you son of a bitch”

people recognize the problem contained within Whedon-style quippyness without knowing the term for the actual issue so they say “quips” when they mean “bathos”

another problem with quips that’s a little harder to analyze and explain is the quips are all in the author’s voice, NOT the characters’.

steve rogers, natalia romanoff, james barnes, tony stark, pepper potts, and bruce banner are people from radically different walks of life, and should therefore have extremely different styles of communication, despite all off them nominally speaking the same language (english). they should have different senses of humor, different senses of where the boundary lies between irreverence and insult, different boundaries, different sore spots, different goals as well as different methods of communication.

the fact that all these characters banter the exact same way, i.e how joss whedon thinks is funny, is incredibly shallow and grating.

steve grew up as a challenging little shit, who was also very small and poor, and he did it in 1920′s-30′s brooklyn new york. he regularly got his ass kicked. tony stark is also challenging and provocative, he’s a shit stirrer, but he grew up rich as all fuck. no one was beating the piss out of him in a dirty alley. tony has grown up surrounded by sycophants, rich enough to get away with whatever amount of bad behavior he wants to pull; steve grew up poor and disabled in a society that openly advocated for the death and degradation of the weak and unfit. why the fuck would they enter a conversation the same way? why would they deliver a snappy retort the same way? natasha romanoff is a spy, she’s manipulative, she’s always watching to see how a joke lands, she’s always conscientiously tuning herself this way and that to get results. she doesn’t have the luxury of casual defiance, or unthinking obnoxiousness, or even standing by her principles and pissing off someone she hates. again, why would she be tossing off little asides the same as tony, or even the same as steve?

the princess bride is sincere, and the characters still banter in their own voices. fezzik is cautious and methodical, inigo is weary and incredulous, vizzini is desperate to impress everyone with his own intelligence and in so doing often sounds like a complete twerp, buttercup is so incredibly pissed off she doesn’t have any brain cells to spare for joking around, and westley is here to ruin everyone’s day. and it works! the characters have great banter because they’re striking sparks off each other, not meshing like identical cogs in a machine.

humor is about subverting expectations, about breaking up patterns, about confrontation and absurdity. you can’t get that from a blandly uniform pulp.

I have never heard anyone summarize Westley’s character so perfectly in a single line

FWIW, "mauve" was one of the coal-tar dyes developed in the mid-19th century that made eye-wateringly bright clothing fashionable for a few decades.

It was an eye-popping magenta purple

HOWEVER, like most aniline dyes, it faded badly, to a washed-out blue-grey ...

...which was the color ignorant youngsters in the 1920s associated with “mauve”.

(This dress is labeled "mauve" as it is the color the above becomes after fading).

They colored their vision of the past with washed-out pastels that were NOTHING like the eye-popping electric shades the mid-Victorians loved. This 1926 fashion history book by Paul di Giafferi paints a hugely distorted, I would say dishonest picture of the past.

Ever since then this faded bluish lavender and not the original electric eye-watering hot pink-purple is the color associated with the word “mauve”.

Oh! Just like the Victorians did to the Gothic, where actual Gothic cathedrals which had been built to be bright and full of light were portrayed as dark and gloomy places, because that's what happens after a cathedral is filled with candles for several hundred years.

Ace attorney is so funny for making a game where you play as a lawyer whose assistant lets him talk to dead people and the only dead person he talks to is a smarter, better lawyer

@madgirlmuahaha

This dog is sitting, standing, and laying at the same time

(via)

interesting fact i have titanium in my spine

Fun Fact!

Titanium not only is crazy durable, but it noo magnet! Thas wy Dock chok jjiun spi; surgyr ad pater noster, qui es in cœlis; sanctificetur nomen tuum: Adveniat regnum tuum; fiat voluntas tua, sicut in cœlo, et in terra. Panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie: Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris: et ne nos inducas in tentationem: sed libera nos a malo.

dude got hit with the ol’ Lorum Ipsem beam😞

Fun fact! Titanium is often used for medical implants because it's *dodges lorem ipsum beam* because it's strong, nontoxic, won't corrode inside the body, and best of all, *dodges* bone will directly grow onto it! This is called "osseointegration" and it means that your titanium artificial hip, dental implant, or whatever will have greater *dodges* greater mechanical stability and will ARRRGGH! aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit!

I was a cheerleader at university, this was in the UK so not serious at all, but we did go and compete at Nationals which were being held in Bournemouth, a fair distance from our uni in London. One of the girls was like "omg you can stay at my house! My parents live like 30 minutes away." so all 25 of us got on the coach with a blanket and pillow and clothes, expecting to like, stay at a house.

Her house in the New Forest. They had a pool and hot tub, a pool house, and I think 4 or 5 bedrooms and 2 reception rooms. I say "I think" because we weren't actually allowed to stay in the house. Our coach and 2 male members stayed in the pool house, which had a very small room, plus a bathroom which all of us were to share. The rest of us had to sleep in a big tent gazebo thing in the garden. In May in England. When none of us were prepared for camping. It was about 10°c in the night, not comfortable at all.

I very briefly saw the inside of the house when I asked her mother if there was another bathroom because we were running late and i needed to put my contact lenses in, and she shooed me into a cupboard under the stairs. The living room I caught a glimpse of had enough space for all of us to sleep there.

The next day when we got back from the competition, we were given a BBQ dinner! Which consisted of 1 chicken leg and 1 potato each.

For the privilege of staying at her house, we all had to give Nadine £5.

Every time I see a post like this, I think of that time, freezing my ass off, in a mansion garden.

today on neat hozier retweets: disappearing birds!

Ooh, invisible bird glitch. That's a rare one, also known to happen to owls.

so i saw this tweet earlier

you too can have a pingus for the low low price of One Thousand Five Hundred pounds quid

hey girl you wanna see my grandiose Pingus

peter sisseck IS Pingus

FINALLY

A POST-TRUTH

CRIME DOCUMENTARY

This is horrible and reminds us once again that there is no legislation for how truthful a documentary has to be. Other jobs like journalists have colleges where you have to face consequences if you lie or manipulate information, but documentaries don't. That's how we get fake documents being used like this AI-generated images of a real person, and also all the liars on Discovery Max and the History channel spewing anti-science stupidity and pretending like it has any basis.

I feel like a lot of people don’t quite get what a butler is. The role tends to get rounded off to ‘male servant’ pretty regularly in some media, whereas actually butlers are typically not just servants but chief servants. The butler was generally in charge of either all male servants or just all servants, period, in the household of an aristocrat or other very wealthy person. This meant that butlers have often been fairly powerful and influential people, and sometimes even had a manservant or two of their own.

(Also, fun fact: Mary Roberts Rinehart, the early 20th century mystery writer who is widely credited with popularizing the whole ‘the butler did it’ trope was nearly murdered by one of her own servants, a chef whom she had passed over for promotion to butler. He came at her with a pistol, but it jammed, allowing her chauffeur time to wrestle it away and restrain him.)

You didn’t answer the key question things brings up: did she popularize the trope before or after the would-be butler tried to kill her?

according to wikipedia, before

There’s something glorious about the fact that the author who popularised “the butler did it” had a servant who a) failed to become the butler and then b) failed to do it.

If he’d been butler material, he’d have finished the job.

BELDAM IS NOW TRANSPHOBIC IN THE ENGLISH LOCALIZATION

THIS MEANS VIVIAN'S TRANSNESS IS CANON IN ENGLISH FOR THE FIRST TIME

WE WON

I never thought I'd be happy for a game to include transphobia in it, but here we are I guess

I have to admit, "keeping Vivian trans in the localization would mean also having to keep Beldam's transphobia in there" was one of things I always felt a bit weird about when it came to wanting a more accurate TTYD localization, but then a trans friend of mine pointed out this means there is now a boss fight in a Mario game where you get to beat up a TERF, and realizing that made me feel a lot better.