my personal pick for most underrated animal is the european legless lizard, which i think is often taken to just look like a normal and rather plain snake, but if you’re familiar with reptile anatomy at all it looks more like some sort of bizarre heraldic fantasy creature than basically anything else on earth
it’s called the lateral groove and is literally a sort of seam in it’s body that’s always present:
I /think/ what’s going on is that these evolved from something like alligator lizards, which have very rigid, slippery underbellies next to soft, stretchy skin on their sides (where their legs are situated), but now that they’ve evolved to be a “snake” and don’t have legs that need to move around, that soft skin has decreased and turned into a weird little seam so they can slither easier and don’t have a big weak point in their sides. it’s compensation to have nice smooth scales all over like a snake would, imperfectly using the lizard anatomy they’re working with
basically it’s the leg removal surgery scar evolution dealt them
is there any point to trying to back up my tumblr to a wordpress blog? Or, since they're owned by the same company, am I just kicking the can down the road?
Nah, wordpress.com won’t disappear, that thing makes money. I would say that’s a safe place for a backup, if your blog fits within the limit of the free plan
pray very hard to your $deity of preference they are going to sell the site and not close it. And to get a new owner that’s not some surveillance-advertising gig, a online-casino, or similar (the only online companies that could have the money to keep this place alive and could do something profitable with it are usually the scummy ones)
taking this out of the reblogs of my last post @deez-no-relation because I think it’s important and its own thought.
There isn’t any place similar to Tumblr on the internet. Here and now is the last shreds of an internet that was, an internet that could exist without monetization. An internet that lasted through so many ~pivots to video~, an internet that is text and gif and photo first. An internet that is driven by serendipity and the impetus of the user to do the searching, the digging, the work that is just handed to you by algorithms on other sites for the purpose of better advertising to you.
The best part about Tumblr is the reason why it can’t monetize and I have been hitting up against this wall for literal years. There’s magic here because it’s one of the places that hasn’t been overrun by ads. Every social site’s business model relies on those midrolls, prerolls, in between story slides, because the money is what keeps them running.
Someone joked about making Tumblr a UNESCO World Heritage site and honestly? That’s where my brain goes, too. Tumblr is a library. Tumblr is a museum. Tumblr is a third place. Tumblr is where people can go to be inspired and go feral over shit they love and indulge in passion and process their shit. How do you monetize that safely?
@taylorswift honestly this is your moment to bankroll Tumblr and save the internet (just kidding….) (unless…..)
