...huh.

...huh.

This is the equivalent post to the ‘people who write hurt/comfort think they need outrageous justifications to take a nap’ post.

this post hasn't left my mind since i've first saw it

My uncle got treed by a hippo once. Spent all night up the tree. Person he was with was injured. I always thought that maybe the hippo could...roll on him? Try to ram them? Maybe it's actually supposed to be a rhino, the one with the horns?

nope. makes so much more sense now that I am seeing these teeth. I am retroactively a bit terrified.

You ever think about how weird hippos are ecologically speaking?

There's literally no other megafauna on earth that spends the entire day lounging around in water, mostly just socializing, only to come onto land to feed at night.

I remember when I used to do education programs on hippos, most people assumed they ate aquatic plants, and that that's the whole reason they were in water. Meanwhile, hippos are basically just giant nocturnal cows that eat only grass.

As always, on this, the anniversary of his passing, GNU Terry Pratchett

now I really want to see this FBI-imagined remake of it's a wonderful life portraying the banker. what a stirring tale of following the rules and "protecting funds put in his care by private individuals" that would be

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) • JIMMY STEWART as George Bailey and LIONEL BARRYMORE as Mr. Potter

amazing. This is everything. I've sort of accidentally started to discover a tiny bit of this by just…tending to my little garden bed where perennials come up (thank you, precious dwellers!) and noticing what they're going to be and occasionally moving them places. I'm at the very, very beginning, but I have sweet smelling lavender that the bees love and some birds have started coming to hang out in my little 2 x 6' area and now there are purple and yellow and light and bright blue flowers on tall stalks. It's my favorite place. Even better since I dared to hang a Pride flag!

anyway, this post is also a really fucking good metaphor for human organizations.

Imagine if baking bread was a skill any person living independently in their own house needed to have at least a passing familiarity with, so there were endless books, blogs and websites about how to bake bread, but none of them seemed to contain the most basic facts about how bread actually works.

You would go online and find questions like "Help, I put my bread in the oven, and it GOT BIGGER!" and instead of saying anything about bread naturally rises when you put yeast in it, the results would be advertising some kind of $970 device that punches the bread while it's baking so it doesn't rise.

Even the most reliable, factually grounded sources available would have only the barest scraps of information on the particularities of ingredients, such as how different types of flour differ and produce different results, or how yeast affects the flavor profile of bread. Rice flour, barley flour, potato flour and amaranth flour would be just as common as wheat flour, but finding sources that didn't treat them as functionally identical would be near impossible. At the same time, websites and books would list specific brands of flour in bread recipes, often without specifying anything else.

An unreasonable amount of people would be hellbent on doing something like baking a full-sized loaf of bread in under 3 minutes, and would regularly bake bread to charred cinders at 700 degrees in an attempt to accomplish this, but instead of gently telling people that their goal is not realistic, books claiming to be general resources would be framed entirely around the goal of baking bread as fast as possible, with entire chapters devoted to making the charred bread taste like it isn't charred.

Anyway, this is what landscaping is like.

sometimes in knitting you just have to go 'nobody but me will notice this mistake' and keep going