Organ critters

Smile face 🌞👹

tfw you look outside😱😱😱

if you like lego + jumping spiders, you should vote on this user created lego product idea! if it gets 10k votes it has the chance to become a real set 🕷️🕷️🕷️

VOTE NOW!!!

Reblogging again cause they're less than 2000 signatures away! Also because I need this to exist

only about 2k left as of 3/23/25! another push!

“The identification of flower flies is not always easy as there are a number of very similar species and no comprehensive reference works. There are many published keys, some are worse than nothing, such as those of Violovitsh, whereas others, while obsolete, are still very useful, such as those of Schiner.”

Thompson, F. Christian & Rotheray, G. 1998. “Family Syrphidae.” Manual of Palaearctic Diptera 3: 81–139. hdl: 10088/17140

Exciting news- I've finally caught all the turtles I need for my research! I'm officially done with field work! To celebrate, please enjoy these memes I made over the past few years to cope with the hell that is trying to catch 60 turtles:

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

Global warming fucking sucks. It's not even April yet and it's over 100F outside (38C).

Here in oregon it went from freezing cold to warm and humid in two days. On the third day (tomorrow) we have a tornado warning, which is unprecedented for this area, but very precedented for areas where the weather fluctuates to this extent, which is not normally here.

on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport the first person on the moon went there by accident and promptly died. The next dozen or so people also went by accident, and also died. Number 14 figured out that people who go to the moon die and very cleverly brought a sword and six weeks of travel rations. This did not help.

No one on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport ever figured out why people die in space because they don’t need airplanes and never found it particularly interesting to climb tall mountains. Astronomers use telescopes to take pictures of the ever-growing pile of corpses on the moon.

“why don’t they teleport back” because they’re not on the planet where everyone can teleport anymore. try to keep up dumbass

#this feels like a fable that would have some kind of moral but I’m not quite sure what#something about like hard work/effort/the need to be curious idk

the moral of the story is that a breathable atmosphere is important to one’s general well-being

is that the anarky symbol?

“anarky”

Yeah, Anarky. From Batman: Arkham Origins. Apparently it is also used by real life anarchists as well, but I recognized it from the game.

I’m,,,

who tf bought arkham origins

tweaking the design of these guys a bit. They're a tiny, solitary, sapient alien that evolved to survive in an endless windstorm. I initially imagined them as sea dwelling, but I think they might work well with a setting I've been tossing around, a little planet dominated by oceans of wheat

They start life as a "mole", a predatory, rat-sized animal that digs complex burrows underneath the wheat. Moles can't talk and don't appear to be sapient, though the subject is contentious (after all, if the solitary, nomadic, unsentimental Larrow didn't, by a quirk of evolution, happen to have such an exceptionally complex vocal range, they'd probably be taken to be animals. Smart animals, maybe, but animals.) The mole stage lasts about 300 years before they develop into the sophont stage, which will only live about 20 or 30 years at most; any culture, art, technology, philosophy, fears, and prejudices the Larrow form are just an accidental byproduct of the mole's mayfly-like breeding season, to be forgotten by the next generation apart from whatever was physically left for them to find. Larrow don't remember being moles, but they dream about it sometimes.

Compilation of animated snakes in honor of 2025 🐍