i know its a stingray but it looks like cthulhu popped his head up to say hi
I thought it was a giant squid.
holy shit they get this big?
They do get this big! They also tame relatively easily and are surprisingly docile animals. Its popular to swim with them in many beachy areas. As long as you’re not stupid and mean to them, your odds of being hurt by them are very low.
I had the opportunity to swim with a school of them on a sandbar once and I must say they are very aggreeable animals, though they do have the tendency to mob you if you have food, and they can be quite heavy. Still very pleasant animals.
ha cthulhu
Humans will pet anything. If aliens come, that might be what distinguishes us from the rest of the galaxy.
“we were going to blow them up, but they engaged in an oddly pleasing patting ritual and, well, it was nice.”
I read today that stingrays recently passed the mirror test: they recognize their own reflection, potentially implying they have some concept of self.
Mirrors reveal something new about manta rays – and it reflects badly on us.
There also needs to be a button for “this is the 5000th time I’ve read your fic because I’m having a horrible day and this is the only thing in the world that always brings me happiness.”
I might have mentioned this before, but developments I am genuinely glad of in fandom over the last couple of decades:
Way less bashing of canon female love interests in order to hook up two male characters – some of that is the advent of the OT3 as a solution to love triangles, but it’s just as common to have the canon couple break up amicably and realistically, or simply tweak things so that they were never a couple, but still like and respect one another as friends
The rise of the reader insert fic, which I’m convinced has taken the pressure off to create an OC for people who really just want to write self-insert fantasy, thereby letting them do what they actually want and (hopefully) helping to lessen the stigma around OCs for those who really want to create OCs
Linked to that, a decrease in the amount that the accusation “Mary Sue!” gets flung around, and intelligent criticism of how gendered the whole “Mary Sue” concept has ended up
Less pressure to “explain” how a character could end up with a character of the same gender in fic, when they’ve always been paired with other-gender characters in canon
A decline in the popularity of extensively mocking/dragging individual fics for bad or inexpert writing (such as through writing MSTs in response where the canon characters read and reacted to the fic), which, looking back, was a pretty shitty thing to do to writers just starting out
Much less likelihood of getting virulently homophobic comments on any given slashfic (”My poor [favourite character] isn’t GAY, how dare you!”)
And, of course, the shining glory that is AO3, an all-inclusive single archive that’s actually run and controlled by fans, meaning no hours spent paging through webrings to find one author who has four fics of that pairing you love and then reading them over and over for months, and no chance of waking up tomorrow to find all your fic purged because some internet company got a pissy letter
I mean, don’t get me wrong, fandom today is no picnic; it’s not like homophobia or sexism have gone away entirely (and to an extent they’ve gone underground, which complicates things), and of course we have the new puritanical backlash, which can sometimes be even more complex to challenge. But fandom back in the day was far from perfect, as well, and some of the ways things have changed are a real breath of fresh air.
security called me at work today and told me they saw me outside chasing a frog around on the security cameras. i wasnt in trouble they just wanted to let me know they saw me. i didn’t catch him.
One time I went to the art museum with my friend and we got into an elevator where there was a very conspicuous camera. My friend looked right into the camera and started salaciously rubbing his shirt over his nipples and giving bedroom eyes to the camera. I smacked him and told him to stop, he was going to get us kicked out. He said “don’t worry, they have a whole museum of fancy art to watch, they’re not watching the elevator cams”.
When we got to the top floor, the elevator doors opened and there was a museum docent standing there like she was just…waiting for us. She said “My friends in security asked me to come up here and tell you that they received your message and they like what you’ve got.” and she just. Walked away. And my friend’s entire body turned red and I haven’t stopped laughing to this day.
Overdressed & Underappreciated 