Theres Moreeee, This Is So So Good.. It Makes Me Emotional Realizing That These Kids Are On The Path

Theres moreeee, this is so so good.. it makes me emotional realizing that these kids are on the path to being fluent cherokee speakers and will be able to keep the language going.

This family is a part of the little cherokee seeds program, creating new first language Cherokee speakers by paying mothers to just bring their babies and craft and cook and speak cherokee with cherokee elders all day. There are only 1500 first language Cherokee speakers, most of them over 65. They also take donations if you want to help keep them going and doing the extremely important work they do!!

Y'all have gotta get more insane about platonic relationships like you are about romantic relationships. We need to get more annoying about them NOW. I need to see more meta and losing our minds over them. Get more annoying NOW. More than that. More than that also.

I don't care about Dungeon Meshi otherwise but "Tallmen" is SUCH an elegant solution to placing humans in a fantasy setting that it's still blowing my mind. Just the term itself is enough to instantly recontextualize humans. They're no longer the default race. They're those big goobers with long legs, striding about all the time. I can so easily envision much more interesting relationships between humans and non-humans because of it. Like perhaps "tallmen" are stereotyped as shepherds by other races because they can watch over their flocks better, or as vagabonds because they are better suited to long travel on foot. And of course, they don't *literally* have to be taller than everybody else, they were just the tallest around whenever the label became the norm, or something like that. I just feel like it's so much better than what I've seen in settings like D&D that go "and humans are the... adaptable, generalist people :)!"

African woolly chafers, genus Sparrmannia, Melolonthinae, Scarabaeidae

Photo 1 by rjbasson, 2-3 by alexdreyer, 4 by renecarbonaio, 5 by riana60, and 6 by hrodulf

Rare images of a leafcutter bee sharing its nest with a wolfspider:

These photographs were taken in Queensland, Australia, by an amateur photographer named Laurence Sanders.

The leafcutter bee (Megachile macularis) can be seen fetching freshly-cut leaves, which she uses to line the inner walls of her nest. The wolfspider moves aside, allowing the bee to enter the nest, and then simply watches as the leaf is positioned along the inner wall.

After inspecting the nest together, they return to their resting positions -- sitting side-by-side in the entryway to the nest.

The bee seems completely at ease in the presence of the wolfspider, which is normally a voracious predator, and the spider seems equally unfazed by the fact that it shares its burrow with an enormous bee.

This arrangement is completely unheard of, and the images are a fascinating sight to behold.

Sources & More Info:

Brisbane Times: The Odd Couple: keen eye spies bee and spider bedfellows in 'world-first'

iNaturalist: Megachile macularis

Sporadic reminder that I have an art blog and I still upload there once in a while.

I did a meme with Ocha over on Twitter a while back.  I started on a second one, because I got a total of 15 species (16 if you count the two separate requests for Tiefling), but I lost steam after two.