Theres A Guy On Youtube Whos Whole Channel Is About Comparing Dinosaur Toys To Actual Dinosaur Anatomy

there’s a guy on youtube who’s whole channel is about comparing dinosaur toys to actual dinosaur anatomy and it’s way more interesting than it has any right to be

It’s the last Fossil Friday of 2021 and we’re closing things out with a big plesiosaur! 🦴 Suspended from the ceiling in the Museum’s Hall of Vertebrate Origins is the whopping Thalassomedon haringtoni. This long-necked plesiosaur lived during the Late Cretaceous some 85 million years ago. It has a relatively small head and many sharp teeth for seizing fishes and other marine animals. The long, flexible neck probably helped in grasping rapidly moving prey. Plesiosaurs, a group related to lizards, lived in the sea. Although they weren’t dinosaurs, they became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous around 65 million years ago, at the same time as the non-avian dinosaurs. Photo: E. Louis/ © AMNH (at American Museum of Natural History) https://www.instagram.com/p/CYKcWbsPH1v/?utm_medium=tumblr

defending modern art to the death against people who are like "its just lines" "my 3 year old could do this" "its just pretentious" and then turning around and joking with other people who like, get it, about how fucking lame a lot of it is

i’ve been asked for book recs a few times, so i thought i’d make a “best books i read in 2021″ list! i’m focusing on novels because i figure that’s what people are more interested in, but i can do poetry and nonfiction at a later date, maybe. if you’re interested in a given novel, please click the title for content warnings, reviews, and plot summaries provided by thestorygraph. so here we go, in no particular order:

linden hills by gloria naylor: this book explores life in an affluent late-20th century black neighborhood with a narrative loosely modeled after dante’s inferno, exploring race, class, sexuality, and gender. it’s really such a rich text. i wrote about it for a class this semester and found it hard to stay within the required page count because there is just so much depth here. i found the bond between the protagonists, willie (a working-class dante figure) and lester (who actually lives in the titular neighborhood, and is the virgil to willie’s dante) really touching and fascinating. thestorygraph lists content warnings for suicide and child death, which is accurate, but i’d add a warning for domestic violence, too.

tehanu by ursula k le guin: if you’ve followed me for a while it’s probably clear that ursula k le guin is one of my favorite writers. this book really solidified that for me. it’s book 4 in the earthsea cycle, so you will have to read the others before it, but…damn. i don’t have words for how powerful this book is. it deals with misogyny and child abuse in earthsea’s society, introduces my favorite character in the series (the titular character), has the most devastatingly good title drop i’ve ever seen, and expands on the characters of ged and tenar in a really beautiful way. the subsequent book is fantastic, too, as are all the other books in the series, but this one is special to me.

freshwater by akwaeke emezi: definitely take a look at the content warnings on this one; this book was deeply triggering for me but it is so goddamn well-written i could not put it down. emezi is an incredible prose stylist, probably the best on this list and the best i’ve read all year. check out their book pet too, it’s incredibly imaginative and also deals with heavy subject matter but without being graphic, so if freshwater’s too heavy i recommend that.

invisible cities by italo calvino: short and beautiful, great prose that’s easy to get lost in. if you’re looking for plot you won’t find it here, but if you want to read pretty words that leave your imagination running wild, this is that. 

a memory called empire and a desolation called peace by arkady martine: a space opera with fantastic world building. i really wasn’t feeling the romantic subplot in this, but everything else about it was so good it didn’t matter. the real internal struggle at the center of this is the protagonist’s love for the literature and language of an imperialist culture that can’t even acknowledge her humanity. i don’t see a lot of SFF try to tackle that kind of thing, so it’s really interesting. mostly i love a good space opera and this is that.

the imperial radch trilogy by ann leckie: okay, technically i read book one last year, but i read the other two this year so it still counts. another space opera that deals with empire, this time through the POV of a ship’s AI. detailed world building, space, and nonhuman characters is a combination i can’t really resist.

giovanni’s room by james baldwin: i read a fair amount of baldwin this year, as i wrote about him for class too, though it was mostly nonfiction and short stories. this is the one baldwin novel i got around to. he was a genius and if you haven’t read anything by him…you should change that. this book is a whirlwind of repression and toxicity and masculinity, it’s delicious. i want to throw it against the wall, but like, in a good way. 

beloved by toni morrison: this one’s a reread, but i can’t not include it; i did my final paper for my first grad school class on this book, so i spent a lot of time with it. a very heavy and beautiful novel. morrison digs into the characters’ inner selves with simultaneous tenderness and brutality, and the result is unforgettable. even in the midst of such intense and real trauma, the book is hopeful in its own way; the words “know it, and go on out” really stick with me. pay attention to the shifting identities of the titular character–she is a ghost who is more than a ghost. 

the murderbot diaries by martha wells: remember when i said i like detailed world building, nonhuman characters, and space? this is that. it’s very different from the other books on this list–a much simpler prose style, for example–but it’s perfect “light reading” for me. just great entertainment, exactly what i want from a pulpy sci-fi series. there are some things about the narration that bug me a little (too many snarky parentheticals, for example), but i love this funky little robot and its adventures. there are six books in this series so far and i’ve read five of them in the past two weeks, if that tells you anything about how easy and fun it is to devour these. 

"I don't want to read leftist theory it's all written by old white men" FANON IS RIGHT THERE

I understand not wanting to read theory because it's exclusive, elitist, or just plain hard to understand, but I'm begging you to please give Fanon's work a read if you can. Especially if your argument for not reading theory is the quote above.

btw… important PSA: cutting off the mold on the surface of food does nothing. you can only see the spores on the surface, but mold itself has spread and grown roots into the food. by the time you can actually *see* the spores, that piece of food is completely full of it. youre still eating mold. 

many of which are poisonous and have been shown to cause cancer. youre not even supposed to sniff it, because that can get spores into your lungs. like if you look up the health and safety guidelines for mold they barely stop short of telling you to put on a hazmat suit. 

like produce is okay as long as you cut around it at least an inch, but cooked foods? you gonna die. stop eating mold people