no gods no kings only mayors

hey good news

there's a specifically designated role in the naked mole rat ecology for "guy who runs off into the wilderness and fucks their way into a stranger's house"

Y'all have no idea how absurdly strange naked mole rats are as creatures They're cold-blooded mammals that live in a eusocial structure with a queen and drones, similar to ants, bees, termites and no other mammal on the planet. They barely need to breathe, with a respiration rate low enough to let them thrive in burrows with 2% oxygen, and survive with 0 oxygen whatsoever for about 20 minutes with zero lasting effects.

They live for over 30 years, which is absurdly long for a rodent, don't grow frail with age, and are basically immune to cancer because their telomeres just never shorten.

Naked Mole Rats are rodents that attempted to evolve into bugs, failed, and unlocked the secret to immortality in the process.

i love it when ryoko kui draws the gang in a modern setting but they still have their armour on

like this one specifically. jacket over plate and chainmail armour. sweatpants. hiking boots. i wish people dressed like this for real

i think a big reason that I get frustrated with the "liberals have never made anybody's lives better" is that in the US it used to be legal for insurance companies to charge you more if you were sick or even just straight up deny you the ability to sign up for them if you already had a "pre-existing condition", and this was only stopped by the passage of the ACA during Obama's term. but a lot of people who talk about politics on here are too young to really be affected by that since they would have been on their parents insurance (which the ACA required insurers extend until you're 26). and this was all done via politicking and not blowing up insurance CEOs mansions or whatever.

I'm not saying that the ACA fixed insurance forever, god no. but "you can't deny someone insurance for being sick" is a massive change and people don't realize it!

You are underselling the change. Let us recall "rescission," where as soon as it turned out that someone had an expensive medical condition, the insurance company would start coming through their medical history looking for ways to invent a preexisting condition and revoke their coverage.

It really frightens me if kids don't know about how bad the US insurance system used to be.

My dad didn't have any health insurance in his 40s, because he was a freelancer and his (Frankly not bad at all) existing health issues allowed insurunace to fully deny him.

When his girlfriend was dying of cancer they had to have a long discussion about what they'd do when she hit her insurance's lifetime coverage limit and they would no longer cover her cancer care.

People should understand that it was Obama and the Democrats who stopped that kind of thing.

Yeah the way to avoid that shit was to get a group plan through your employer, without that insurance was unaffordable/worthless

And even those group plans were not reliable unless they were huge. I know someone who worked for a smallish company. About 100 people. One of their workers had a child with hemophilia. Required VERY expensive regular infusions to treat. When renewal time came around, the insurance company gave the company management a choice: They could either exclude hemophilia from the plan or double their premium. They got the (Democratic) state insurance commissioner and their (Democratic) state legislator involved and the insurers eventually backed down. But it could have gone the other way. The real solution is a single insurance pool that includes everyone.

Also: medical transition or a gender dysphoria diagnosis could be a preexisting condition.

I was denied insurance outright for having a high BMI and a thyroid condition, despite being in excellent health at the time. Them not being able to do this anymore is huge, actually.

ive told a lot of sneering conservative coworkers to their faces that obamacare saved my life and i could very easily have died in my early twenties if he hadn't been president. it's always been interesting to see what someone does next in a conversation after that.

Transgender Star Trek, And The Final Frontier! Bjo Trimble, Transgender Tapestry, Issue #76, Summer 1997

Courtesy Digital Transgender Archive

I’m sure plenty of people know about this already, but it never hurts to be reminded that these discussions have existed for a long time!

I wrote up a transcript for the article to read under the cut for anyone who’s having a struggle reading it.

Keep reading

And it was written by Bjo Trimble, one of the superfans of the 1960s. She was one of the people behind the letter-writing campaign that saved TOS. 

"Okay, so Harrison Armory villains are sneering imperialists, Karrakin villains are classist elites, IPS-N villains are amoral corporate profitmaxxers, and HORUS villains are slimeball hackers, but what would an SSC villain look like?"

Well, I have a few ideas...

when i was a kid i had moments of being so fucking diabolical because i realized at some point the best way to leverage power over my family was to do shit that would make everybody late

our house was in the middle of nowhere surrounded by woods so when i decided i didnt want to wear dresses anymore if we were going to some event & my parents insisted i had to wear a dress i would just go hide in the woods. was so committed i almost made us miss a flight once bc my mom packed a dress in my suitcase

i only promised to stop doing this if my parents got me formal boys clothes to wear which eventually they did. i don't feel bad about resorting to violence bc i asked politely and they said no. proud of 10 yr old me for evil annoying lesbian behavior

5th grade was the last time I wore a dress for school pictures. When my parents attempted to force the issue for 6th grade, I climbed onto our roof and pulled the ladder up after me. My dad borrowed the neighbors ladder. As soon as it touched the roof I pulled it up too. By the time I had 3 ladders they were willing to negotiate, and 2 hours late for work.

@ta2020photography

"Female Northern Harrier performs acrobatic maneuver."

@rfskia this seems like something you would appreciate if you haven't already seen it

Perfection.

Some unposted Tolkien art I've been collecting over the years 💫

Huan and Lúthien | Yavanna and Aulë | Celeborn and Galadriel | Fingon | Galadriel but Art Nouveau | Vairë, the Weaver | Lórien and Mandos | Some Hobbiteses

knitting tutorial made by a twenty-something knitting influencer: 18 min long, 12 of those minutes being the intro and a sponsor plug, they show the first few steps of the tutorial at the slowest speed known to man, they show the most important steps at a neck-break speed, they stop every five seconds to talk about what they just did, 40,000 comments filled with questions ranging from insightful to “how do i knit”, filmed with a camera that costs more than a car, the tutorial is incorrect.

knitting tutorial made by a seventy-something grandmother: two min long, filmed 17 years ago, shows you what you want with the skilled patient hands of a beloved deity, made with the world’s shittiest camera, the best video on the fucking internet, four comments and 30 views, you lose the video and never find it again.

two things i’m noticing in the notes:

1. every artist/crafter/cook agreeing that influencers in their communities also pull shit like this

2. ppl shouting out their fav old lady tutorials and being like “i would die for u diane”

everyone in the notes was being super lovely and dropping their fav tutorials/crafters, so i made a list of some of them (sorry if i missed any!):

Joanne’s web (knitting and crochet)

Knitting with Suzanne Bryan (knitting)

EliZZa (German knitting community)

Jane Loures (cooking)

Happy Berry Crochet (crochet)

Sue Ripsch (chainmaille jewelry)

SeaLemonDIY (book binding)

FourKeysBookArts (book binding)

sheilasknittingtipsandtricks

VeryPinkKnits (several recs for this!)

Mick Grewcock (bow making)

Mrs Nadelspiel (knitting)

Winwick Mums Knit n Natter (knitting Facebook group)

Cutsey Crafts (embroidery)

Twinsday (sewing)

Creative Grandma (crochet)

Das Bookbinding (bookbinding)

Yoyomax12 (baking)

Sharon B (doll repainting)

Nimbleneedles (knitting)

Chasing Sunraee (crochet)

Heindselman’s Knit & Chasing Sunraee (crochet)

Heindselman’s Knit & Gifts (America’s oldest knitshop)

Ivor Sorefingers (guitar)

Elly Everyday (overnight sourdough recipe)

K3n Slowstitch (stitching)

Miss Nancy/Nancy Zieman (PBS knitting episodes for free on youtube)

Roxanne Richardson (knitting)

Imamu Room Husbento (bento box making)

Nerdforge (bookbinding)

Jess Huff (amigurumi)

Nerdy Knitting (knitting)

Gayle Francis (crochet)

Bag-o-day Crochet (crochet)

Sewing with Nancy (sewing)

Felts by Philippa (felting)

Sowoolly (knitting)

Nadelspiel (knitting)

Lacefromireland (lace)

Bill Souza (yarn crafts for left handed folks)

and my personal fav that I just had to look up:

Glendalf, who made a tutorial for fixing a prius battery.

I personally love Sheep & Stitch on yt for the most basic of knitting btw

A Tiger and His Boy

Fascinating

reddit is having a glitch where it puts the wrong captions over photos and it’s the only thing i care about right now

I mean that about sums it up

it’s crazy how much diversity there can be in one species…these are all pictures of the same bird species (red-tailed hawk)

what they all have in common:

The look of annoyance and utter disdain at the human exposing their wing pit.

Yes.

UNHAND ME FEATHERLESS BIPED