A scientist in England has made an enlightening discovery about Atlantic puffins — under a UV light, their bills glow like a freshly cracked glow stick.
“It was sort of discovered by accident,” said Jamie Dunning, the ornithologist who first saw the beaks light up.
I can’t tell what is my favorite part of this article, birds see colors humans can’t comprehend, glowing puffin beaks was discover accidentally, or that puffins look really good with aviator glasses.
My favorite is definitely the quote:
So he’s had sunglasses made.
For the puffins.
“This felt like the obvious thing to do,” he said.
also ‘"We’ve actually had some printed in the shape of aviators, just for the fun of it,“ he said.‘
he knows exactly how hilariously adorable and ridiculous it is to put sunglasses on the puffins and they are just gonna roll with it
delightful
(presumably it is to protect lil puffin eyes from taking damage from a big beakless weirdo shining uv lights at the front of their face)
honestly i love the bit in crystal kingdom where kravitz turns into a skeleton and taako’s like ‘well if you wanted me to go over there (the afterlife) you should’ve stayed handsome’ bc it implies that before, taako was 100% Ready To Die to get in on that action. like he just looked at kravitz and went ‘oh hell yeah. murder me immediately. my gay ass is gonna descend straight to hell so i can get a piece of that beefcake’
Me: yeah so I just don’t have the energy to get up and make myself a sandwich or wait for something to cook so I just. Don’t
Her: why don’t you just eat the sandwich components without putting them together
Me:
Her: you can just eat a handful of cheese and some sandwich meat. You don’t have to make a sandwich.
Me:
Me: what
Therapists finding loopholes for mental illness things is one of my favorite things about dealing with mental illness because it really helps me understand that just because a reaction is Common doesn’t mean it’s Right. Does doing dishes stress you out a lot? Buy paper plates. Do your obsessive thoughts make you worry about leaving your curling iron on so you drive home from work to check? Just put the curling iron in your purse and bring it to work with you while we work on tackling where this worry comes from. Symptom management doesn’t have to look like drudgery.
i used to go days without showering because seeing my body was so upsetting that i would end up spiraling and then i realized i could simply turn the lights out. it took some getting used to but i’ve been showering with the lights off for years and it’s now one of my favorite parts of my day.
do whatever you want nothing is real and there’s no need to inflict unnecessary suffering on yourself just to try to seem “normal”
I love this post
Hmmm
These kinds of loopholes make life so. Much. Better.
You have no idea how many people lurk on your work. No idea how many times people go back to revisit your work. How big they smile when they simply think about your work. How fast their heart beats, how excited they get when they see that you posted something.
People are shy with their feedback. Sometimes it’s because they’re simply shy. Other times it’s because they assume you already know how great and talented you are. Could be both.
My point is, even if you barely have any likes or reblogs, don’t get discouraged. You have a lot of silent fans, but they are still your fans. Keep on creating. Because there is always someone out there who will love what you have made.
It’s kind of ironic that Wheatley from Portal 2 has become enshrined as the iconic example of fan-artists anthropomorphising everything under the sun as skinny, ambiguously twentysomething white dudes in dapper suits, given that he’s like the one character who actually deserves it.
i saw the explanation one time of “he’s a bumbling idiot with a maddening insistence all his horrible ideas are right, of course he’s a white man” and i’ve never heard anything so true in my life
Definitely there’s that, but I’m more referring to the fact that Wheatley’s literal function in the game’s plot is to stand as a monument to white male mediocrity. Like, it’s not even subtle!
(Him and Cave Johnson both, really, albeit in different ways. Cave is a takedown of how that mediocrity can become romanticised in the sufficiently privileged: an ineffectual blunderer with more money than good sense becomes a daring visionary whose ideas fail to change the world only because the world isn’t ready for them, and any damage he’s managed to cause is reframed as evidence of how far ahead of the curve he is. Wheatley’s the flip side of that coin, the wheedling sycophant who thinks he’s got what it takes to sit in the big-boy chair, but wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of influence if he got it.)
I would’ve called Cave Johnson a “wow, they’re not even trying to be subtle” ripoff-slash-parody of Elon Musk’s career trajectory, were it not for the fact the game came out 7 years ago
@unbadger look u’ve made portal discussion history on tumblr
Maybe it has something to do with his voice actor literally being a tall, blonde, white man…?
#it’s not that deep
I have to disagree strongly on this one. If you look at the story in portal two and one it is absolutely loaded with critique of American society and absolutely contains both feminist and anti white supremacy undertones.
For example: Take the fact that the first installment revolves around two driven women characters who are only really in conflict because they’ve been turned against each other by the ambitions of male scientists in positions of power. (And yes. Most of the known male scientists in Portal canon if we include the comic, are men. Caroline could be a secretary for all we know. And we all know what fate she suffered for her loyalty to Cave, even if she was a scientist herself.)
Most, if not all of the male characters in Portal are portrayed as inept mediocre buffoons or quirkily programmed robits. The exception is Doug Ratmann who is a chronically mentally ill guy who is onto Aperture’s bullshit and actively working to save Chell for some mysterious reason.
Another notable thing in Portal is the presence of the moon, which has been linked for centuries on end with femininity due to the cyclical nature of the female reproductive system. It’s especially fascinating that the downfall of both Cave Johnson and Wheatley in P2, is the moon itself. (Cave gets moondust poisoning and Wheatley is blasted into space via the moon.) Perhaps its a symbol for feminist social progress and its effect on haphazard scientific culture of the anglo-western world.
The fact that you play as a colored woman of mixed race for the majority of the two games, who is most endangered in spaces which are a bright, sterile white is also notable. This would be relatively meaningless and “makes sense in a scientific environment” if it wasn’t for the fact that almost all of the “safe spaces” in the game where GLaDoS can’t reach you and you achieve a semblance of peace happens to be in shadowy, brown, dark areas. Further underscoring the very tangible symbolism in the portal series that represents a humanist antithesis to the power structures present in our contemporary world.
I hope you enjoyed my essay, I’m ready for my ValvE analyst PHD.
Plot Designing 