We're here, We're Queer, We're in too many fandoms

That wizard robe is spelling on him

He's definitely casting with this drip

this was cute until i realized the fish is probably trying to not get eaten

A fish trying not to get eaten wouldn’t slow down when the “predator” slows down. It also wouldn’t constantly swim in a circle near the edge of the tank; It’d try hiding. Also a fish in a tank in a a public place that is constantly filled with people is not likely to see people as predators.

Animals, I think people tend to forget, also enjoy playing.

yeah that fish is absolutely playing with that kid, if it really wanted to escape it would just dive into the reef in the center of the tank!

(Moorish Idols are reef fish and naturally will seek shelter in the nearest nook or cranny if they get scared.)

many people don’t realize this, but fish aren’t stupid animals! most of them are on par with mammals like mice and squirrels in terms of intelligence, and they absolutely do play.

I was at an aquarium a few years ago and decided to sketch a fish. It came up to me.

I decided to flip the book around and pressed it against the glass. Fish lost it

Swam away then came back with MORE FISH

to this day I love those little sketches and I really love how I got the fish to bring me it’s friends

Hi! Professional marine biologist and aquarist here- fish absolutely play, and not only that, can be trained.

I accidentally trained a fish once through playing.

Let me explain.

The small-time aquarium I worked at about 4 years ago had a decent sized female Sheephead. Sheephead are bright red with the males sporting a black head, and get big. I’m talking almost 1m long at full maturity (and may or may not transition from female to male depending on the number of males present). Point is, even though not fully matured, this Sheephead was a bit of a heavyweight in her kelp forest tank with a length of about 1ft making her the resident Biggest Dog In The Yard. And she absolutely knew it. She would bully her tankmates if she wanted to steal their food.

The thing about this Sheephead- let’s call her Red- is that she had one heck of a ‘tude. Red was known to splash aquarists whenever they fed the tank, and at almost a foot long with a wide tail, her splashes had quite a bit of heft and would soak you from the torso down. We were advised to bring a towel or two to protect ourselves from most of the drenching. When it was my go-around to feed Red’s tank, I was fairly new to the little facility, but I had been warned in advance of Red’s penchant for food thievery. I noticed she would follow my hand movements, so I slowly moved to drop her food in a far corner, and fed her tankmates directly from my hands or by tong if they were too deep. I always made sure Red had plenty to eat, but I didn’t want her to associate the food with bad behavior, so I treated her to a bit extra food whenever she didn’t steal food. One day, she made a beeline to the surface so fast that she did a small jump, her entire head breaching the water. She wasn’t bothering her tankmates or doing anything remotely dangerous- and full disclosure, it was cute seeing a fish jump for joy- so I laughed and gave her another piece of food.

Naturally, positive reinforcement led to her connecting the dots that jumping at the surface, even the tiny jumps she was doing, meant she got more food.

This started to become an everyday occurrence, whenever I was assigned to feed Red’s tank. She would jump, just enough for her head to pop out, then she’d wait patiently for me to give her the treat she CLEARLY earned. It even got to the point that she’d open her mouth and I’d drop the food right into those massive jaws- this was preferable to her Kenghis Khan-ing her way through a shower of chopped squid like the Tasmanian Devil, as there was less risk of her accidentally (or purposefully) biting a tankmate that got too close. Red became a polite eater for the first time.

It wasn’t until I noticed she followed me around outside of feeding time that I realized Red was playing with me.

I never got splashed by Red even once. My coworkers, however, received quite the dunking whenever it was their turn to feed the kelp tank.

There are many benefits to being a marine biologist

this is what a Bodhisattva is

Oh, literally!

Mind blown 😂

So pure and adorable

I watched this like 6 the times I never tire of his reaction

Absolutely pure.  What a trick, what a reaction!

Look guys, it is good to engage with people you don’t agree with 100% politically on occasion. This is not me telling you to try to befriend neo-nazis. I mean, as a leftist, sometimes you’ve got to meet a middle aged lukewater democrat where they’re at and try to open a dialogue to help educate them on issues and discuss your beliefs. If someone seems receptive to listening and learning, that is a great chance to speak and teach. I know it’s fun to make fun of the libs but sometimes ill-informed but well-intentioned Facebook liberals have had propaganda shoved down their throats for 50 years and just need someone to explain the issues to them in a way that is kind and not condescending. It’s not your job but it is nice, it is a nice thing to do and it is nice to try to treat others with understanding. This is a good time to do that, there are a lot of people out there who are frightened and confused.

How it feels trying to tell people on the left that communicating and uniting with other people on the left is actually good:

Sherlock Holmes having a universal ace experience -- expressing disinterest and immediately getting called an inhuman robot.

#images#sherlock holmes#sorry i don't turn rabid and marry the prettiest girl in sight at the push of a button my dear watson

Watson is like "of course I proposed marriage to a girl I met two days ago, I'm normal and make rational decisions"

#I read this part just the other day#He literally proposes within two days it’s crazy

Every Sherlock Holmes remake that tries to make Watson the straight man does him a great injustice. Mfer is a total madlad. Everyone's like "oh he's not addicted to hard drugs and doesn't do chemistry experiments in his bedroom for fun" there are subtler ways to be completely unhinged.

The thing is, Watson may or may not instigate the Situations & Shenanigans, but he voluntarily spends most of his Sherlock Holmes, who DOES!

““Normal”“ people do not do that.

Watson will show up at Holmes' place and be like "are you doing any investigations of super weird shit today" and Holmes will be like "yes I am cornering this dangerous mass murderer, you should come and bring your gun in case anyone tries to shoot us" and Watson will do it without question, thinking "I'm so glad he's got something wholesome to distract himself with so he doesn't take more cocaine".

Their mock election was so realistic the school even played the role of the CIA

your caption is doing numbers on copy-paste twitter

Oof

They stole my labor for profit. They did a capitalism to me on a communism meme. I can't decide if that's hilarious or infuriating.

What if Jim and Bones accidentally skip forward seven levels of friendship at the Academy through a combination of codependency and peril and forget that they actually don’t know everything about each other six months in…

Jim: Yeah, when I was on Tarsus, we -

Bones: Excuse me, when you were on WHERE

Jim: did we not have this conversation 

Bones: no we fucking well did not

Jim: whoops

Five minutes later

Bones: I can’t believe you were on Tarsus because your family sent you there. I would never send my daughter to- 

Jim: YOU HAVE A DAUGHTER? 

Bones: oh we missed that too didn’t we

Five minutes later

Jim: I can’t believe this! Do we actually know anything about each other? Is your name even Bones? 

Bones: …you know it’s not, right?

Being a ranger I spend a lot of time alone in the wilderness for hours in the company of one of four co workers.

One such worker for the purpose of this post we shall refer to as Dave.

Dave is a very quiet man. He confesses that if conversation happens too quickly and for too long he gets tired so we often work in silence. He's very polite and good natured but it's obvious that he would happily live and work alone for the rest of his life given the option.

He's very much in the previous generation of ranger, a practical man in his fourties or fifties happy to be kept physically busy for a day and then be sent home with some pay. I had to show him how to use a work issued smart phone.

Meanwhile the rest of the team is made up of the current generation of rangers; openly nurodivergent queer women in their twenties or thirties who work this job because it's the only setting where we can vaguely look sane.

So Dave sticks out a bit. It's really nice when he opens up though because he's an impulsive individual when left to his own devices and has plenty of stories to tell if the mood takes him. I really like working with Dave.

Anyway, one day we've got a job that takes a three hour hike to get to and early on the topic of deer comes up.

I hadn't realised this was the first time we had discussed deer, but blatantly it was. Dave's entire demeanour changes, there's a bit of passion in his voice, but it's also hushed as if he's talking about something sacred.

"Deer are my favourite animal." He says.

I'm also eager to hear Dave talk about himself, so I encourage him to say more.

"I'd love to be a deer myself."

And more

"If a genie offered me the opportunity to become a deer I'd take it. I wouldn't even stop to ask what the price was."

And more

"Sometimes I feel like I'm a deer having a dream about being a human.*

And there I am, a long time commuter to the therian/otherkin community keeping up the encouraging face of someone being politely interested, knowing that this man is straight up a therian with no frame of reference.

And I decided that I wouldn't push the subject outside of the bounds of what Dave is comfortable with, I wouldn't try to teach him the terms "Therian" or "Otherkin" but absolutely I would talk with this man as if he's a deer.

And it's a bit magical really. He's an impulsive individual so I have to talk him out of some risky choices every so often and "this is why deer like you keep getting stuck in fences" has become this magical phrase that allows him to step down from a mistake with a bit of a smile on his face.

in celebration of april 13, i present all four known photos of neil, who banged out the tunes 19 years ago today

source: theagilerat.com (click right to see all four photos!)

Research has shown that pleasure affects nutrient absorption. In a 1970s study of Swedish and Thai women, it was found that when the Thai women were eating their own (preferred) cuisine, they absorbed about 50% more iron from the meal than they did from eating the unfamiliar Swedish food. And the same was true in the reverse for the Swedish women. When both groups were split internally and one group given a paste made from the exact same meal and the other was given the meal itself, those eating the paste absorbed 70% less iron than those eating the food in its normal state.

Pleasure affects our metabolic pathways; it’s a facet of the complex gut-brain connection. If you’re eating foods you don’t like because you think it’s healthy, it’s not actually doing your body much good (it’s also unsustainable, we’re pleasure-seeking creatures). Eat food you enjoy, it’s a win-win.

what

no seriously

what?

PLEASURE IS A NECESSARY PART OF HUMAN HEALTH, BOTH PSYCHOLOGICALLY AND PHYSICALLY

this is why you should be eating your chips with salsa and guac instead of beating yourself up for not eating a salad with tomato and avocado (unless you are a salad bitch like me then enjoy both of them!)

here’s a recent systemic review of all the research done on the subject

for those of you wondering if the studies cited above are legit and if so where we can read about them, here’s a link to one of the (more than a dozen!) papers written on the topic of nutrient absorption and how you eat your food:

hey look, additional info!

Being in a fandom for 20+ years is weird because you’ll see posts like, “How come I never see people mention x” and it’s like. We did. We talked about that a lot, actually. Actually it’s something that came up. And it’s hard not to be like, “Yeah, we discussed this fifteen years ago.” Half of this fandom wasn’t even born when these discussions happened. Wild.

PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997)

My favorite thing about fanfic Zuko is that he just does not have a reference point for sexism. Like:

Some person: isn’t that women’s work?

Zuko, thinking of Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee: women’s work? You mean homicide?

When Zuko becomes Fire Lord he’s sitting in a meeting where there happens to be only one female advisor, Takiko (Which strikes him as a bit weird but for now he’s got bigger gazellefish to fry because he’s still trying to figure out who is worth keeping around even if *sometimes* (every day) he’s tempted to just turf them all out and start from scratch rather than deal with the paranoia) and Takiko’s in the middle of giving a presentation when they run out of tea. One of the male advisors remarks on this loudly, staring pointedly at Takiko. Because some female in the room “obviously” she’s the one who should be making the tea.

Takiko, used to this nonsense, starts to move towards the pot but to the collective shock of everyone in the room she is waved away by the Fire Lord.

“No, no, you’re in the middle of your presentation, I’ve got this,” says Zuko.

Male advisor: *sputtering* “My Lord! Surely Takiko can do that. Is it not below your station to pour tea?”

Zuko: “It’s fine. Uncle Iroh always pours his own tea and he’s ranked above all of you.”

*Room collectively recalls that Uncle Iroh is Dragon of the West*

Male advisor, changing tack: “She has uh… much more experience with such things.”

Zuko: *displaying an impressive level of control in using a fire technique to heat the pot that he learned during his time working in the Earth Kingdom tea shop* “I doubt it.”

(The kicker: Zuko makes better tea than anyone in the room has had in an official meeting in *years*.)

Doctor Who The Robot Revolution

new doctor who tommorow. And I it’s honour- Here’s this Very Important Post

Source

Video of Tama

Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

The picture in the background of the second one

Tama is boss

THE TRAINS HAVE CARTOON TAMAS ON THEM

Sad update everyone, Tama recently passed away… An estimated 3,000 people, including railway officials, attended Tama the cat’s funeral on Sunday, days after she died of heart failure aged 16. [x]

For those who haven’t read articles about it, the local shrine elevated her to a god. She’s now the Eternal Stationmaster and patron god of the station.

Beautiful.

Now I’m crying thanks

and a new cat was hired right?

yep! her name is Nitama (essentially ”second tama” or “tama II”) and she served under Tama as an apprentice before being appointed her deputy

she works very hard

Everytime this crosses my dash, I reblog. It is the law.

Law

I’m crying at 11pm over train cats

Nitama, already now a mature cat (born 2010), has a protege named Yontama (fourth Tama, b. 2016).  There is no information available for either the physical befellment or tragic self-disgrace which has removed Santama from contention.

^Nitama majestic, and below with Yontama

Yontama.

a legacy

okay but actually what happened to santama (or sun-tama-tama, which is her name because it’s a pun on santama) was that she was basically sent to train for the position in okayama and they liked her so much they refused to send her back

Every time I see this post there’s new info and it gets better

You are only allowed to scroll pass this after you pay tribute to the great Tama Station masters.

The shrine of Tama Daimyōjin (Great gracious deity Tama), next to the Kishi station where she worked.

Nitama presenting her yearly offerings to Tama Daimyōjin on the anniversary of Tama’s Death, June 23 (The offerings are presented by the company president, as Nitama is a cat and thus can’t hold the offerings herself) (Not pictured, but also present, Yontama)

you cannot pass without reblogging guys. i’m sorry, i don’t make the rules.

You can’t not reblog a goddess. It’s just what’s so. :)

So, fun fact- the manga Noragami has an arc where the main character, Yato (a minor kami/God that is down on his luck but trying to make it big time) goes to a council/conference for all the Gods in Japan.

And they are announcing the winner of the “up and coming god” award, and of course, Yato thinks it’s him.

But no-

ITS TAMA!