fluffygif:

Clean hands, clean phone and I’m gone.

Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/651063951122219008.

Sometimes when I’m birdwatching

Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/189846697406.

meklarian:

Golden-Crowned Sparrow
Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, Ft. Bragg, California, USA
October, 2018

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/183666663311.

debunkshy:

Clark’s Grebe
Union Reservoir, CO
13 July 2018

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/179772023920.

Christian Siriano Spring 2017 RTW

Reposted from http://ift.tt/2gJvs38.

“It’s not really out to prove that women can be strong or funny or handle powerful weapons. In most movies, such offers of proof are accompanied by reassurances that the women in question are still sexy or maternal or eager to settle down with the right guy — that they fulfill some kind of conventional idea of femininity. Ghostbusters doesn’t bother with any of that, and in the process seems to be on the verge of inventing a new set of archetypes.”

– New York Times film critic A.O. Scott in So That’s Who You Call: The Politics of the New ‘Ghostbusters’ (via calystarose)

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dendroica:

New Image of Pluto: ‘Houston, We Have Geology’

It began as a point of light. Then, it evolved into a fuzzy orb. Now – in its latest portrait from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft – Pluto is being revealed as an intriguing new world with distinct surface features, including an immense dark band known as the “whale.”

As the newest black and white image from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) appeared on the morning of July 10, members of the science team reacted with joy and delight, seeing Pluto as never before. There will no doubt be many similar moments to come. New images and data are being gathered each day as New Horizons speeds closer to a July 14 flyby of Pluto, following a journey of three billion miles.

“We’re close enough now that we’re just starting to see Pluto’s geology,” said New Horizons program scientist Curt Niebur, NASA Headquarters in Washington, who’s keenly interested in the gray area just above the whale’s “tail” feature. “It’s a unique transition region with a lot of dynamic processes interacting, which makes it of particular scientific interest.”

New Horizons’ latest image of Pluto was taken on July 9, 2015 from 3.3 million miles (5.4 million kilometers) away, with a resolution of 17 miles (27 kilometers) per pixel. At this range, Pluto is beginning to reveal the first signs of discrete geologic features. This image views the side of Pluto that always faces its largest moon, Charon, and includes the so-called “tail” of the dark whale-shaped feature along its equator. (The immense, bright feature shaped like a heart had rotated from view when this image was captured.)

“Among the structures tentatively identified in this new image are what appear to be polygonal features; a complex band of terrain stretching east-northeast across the planet, approximately 1,000 miles long; and a complex region where bright terrains meet the dark terrains of the whale,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern. “After nine and a half years in flight, Pluto is well worth the wait.”

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The wizardly way to deal with this is to chat with spiders until they no longer frighten you. :)

They are not the world’s most voluble conversationalists. Mostly what they have to say is “Hungry”, “gotta make a web”, “gotta hang out in the web”, “OH WOW I CAUGHT SOMETHING YAY!”, “Sorry, can’t talk, gotta wrap up what I caught”, “Mmmmm” (at dinnertime), “gotta take the web down and conserve my resources”, and (seasonally) “HEY PRETTY LADY / PRETTY GUY, LET’S DANCE / FUCK”.

But if you can get them past that — usually by persistence: wizards who specialize in insects learn persistence pretty early on — you will also hear “Whoops, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, you looked kinda like a tree from that angle”, “Oh come on, the wind blew me into your hair, do you think I wanted to be here? You are not remotely edible”, “You wouldn’t have a caterpillar on you, would you? I missed lunch”, “How do you get by with so few legs? I am so sorry for you”, “I am so not ready for sex yet”, and “Would you turn off that damn light?”, or alternately “Thank you for leaving the porch light on last night, best meal I’ve had in ages, I asked all my mates round and everybody made out like bandits.”

…Wizards aside, I once had a conversation rather like this with a driveway full of tarantulas (they would come out and bask on cool mornings because the driveway would store the sun’s heat overnight). The brown tarantula, early in the morning before things warm up enough for them to get active, is the most docile and sociable of creatures. They sit there and look at you with all their little eyes. You look at them with your two. Peaceful coexistence, until they start quietly creeping away to hide in the bushes.

(I also had a long talk some years ago with the giant Malaysian hissing cockroach up at the Museum of Natural History in NY, but I can’t discuss that because it was mostly about sex.)

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