C-3PO makes me laugh because you have to remember he was assembled by a child out of things from a scrap heap. Everything about him makes sense if you bear that in mind. Anakin wanted a droid who could help his mother, but the only AI package he could find was one somebody threw out for being too fussy. The combination of tweaking to give him a worried/caring personality makes him constantly anxious. A protocol droid comes with a fair amount of language packages, but why stop there? Somebody threw out like, three different galactic language dictionaries because they weren’t the recent edition. Just load ‘em all up. all of them, even the packs that contain things like ewok and a thousand variants of different manufacturers’ droid codecs. don’t add half the other requirements most legal protocol droids have included at the factory like emergency wipe protocols or shutdown failsafes, or programmed obsolescence. Build that sucker out of non-commercial materials that are already over a hundred years old and still good, tweak it to withstand tatooine of all places.
so now you have this droid that is over thirty years old and it could never be obsolete because it was never manufactured by anybody but a kid on a sand ball somewhere, it’s never running down because it was built to last on tatooine and there’s nothing programmed in to try and urge you to buy the latest model because there is no latest model. 3P0 is simultaneously totally useless yet hyper functional because he was not made according to any specs except “the best most toughest things possible to help my mom for a long long time on a hot desert planet”
Invincible multilingual anxiety bot here to wreck your capitalist droid ideals
God said to Adam: you may eat of any other tree in the garden, but you must not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, for when you eat of it you will die. And Adam fashioned an axe, and he cut down the Tree of Knowledge. And God asked “Adam, what have you done?” And Adam said “I refuse to be complicit in my own temptation.”
God said to Adam: you may eat of any other tree in the garden, but you
must not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, for
when you eat of it you will die.
So Adam picked the fruit of the tree and planted it in the ground. A few years later, another Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil grew from the place he had planted it, and Adam ate the fruit of that one.
God said to Adam: you may eat of any other tree in the garden, but you
must not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, for
when you eat of it you will die. But the serpent told him this was lies,
and that if he ate from the Tree of Knowledge he would not die, but
would become as God. “How do you know?” asked Adam. “Have you eaten the
fruit?” “Yes,” said the serpent. “I have tasted of it, yet I did not
die.” So Adam ate the serpent.
God said to Adam: you may eat of any other tree in the garden, but you
must not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, for
when you eat of it you will die. And Adam asked “The fruit of the Tree?”
And God said “Yes, the fruit of the Tree”. So Adam picked the leaves of the Tree and made a delicious Good
And Evil Salad.
God said to Adam: you may eat of any other tree in the garden, but you
must not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, for
when you eat of it you will die.
Adam desired to taste of the fruit, and he decided that if he was going to get in trouble for breaking a commandment he might as well go all out. So he waited until the tree was heavy with fruits, then binged on all of them in one sitting. And the Lord definitely cast him out of Eden – but on the plus side, thousands of years later his descendants had excellent moral compasses and always knew the right thing to do in every situation.
God said to Adam: you may eat of any other tree in the garden, but you must not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, for when you eat of it you will die. And Adam obeyed the commandment, and instead he ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Cool and Uncool. Then he saw his own nakedness, and found it unfashionable, so he made a snazzy jacket out of leaves and bark. And the Lord saw the jacket, and said “Adam, have you eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Cool and Uncool?” And Adam said “You’re not my dad, you can’t tell me what to do.” And the Lord sent him forth from the garden, but Adam just said “Laaaaaaaaaame”.
“but on the plus side, thousands of years later his descendants had excellent moral compasses and always knew the right thing to do in any situation.” Which is not to say they *did* it, they just knew what they *should* do.
why do they always show cranberries in thos big pits n its implied its wet and possibly swimmable. do cranberries really grow like that. wh
You’ve never heard of The Bog?
th
the what
EACH ADDITION TO THIS POST MAKES MY BLOOD RUN COLD
This is a cranberry bog (unflooded) it’s how cranberries grow. Once they’re ripe, the blog is flooded and the cranberries harvested.
Basically by using big floaty things to round them all up and then scooping them out of the water.
thank u. i hate it a little less but the horrible little man in my head is still screaming “BOG BODY BOG BODY BOG BODY”, but i appreciate the education,
not that kinda bog. less peat, for one thing, and 300% fewer mummified Celts.
this is Nepenthes ampullaria, and they actually do this! they sit on the forest floor and eat leaf litter that falls into their pitchers, making them technically detritivores from our petty human meat-eating point of view.
the face of cannibalism
These are SO CUTE
Yeah it’s wild I mean technically plants already “feed on detritus” I guess, but they wait for those nutrients to integrate with the soil. This plant evolved to catch insects for extra nutrients, then stumbled onto the fact that it could just catch EVEN FRESHER DIRT instead.
I’ve heard anecdotes that staghorn ferns in the wild might do something similar but I can’t find much about that??
Pre-dirt dirt!
i didn’t even consider this…..pre-dirt dirt……what do i do with this information…..
When Thranduil read in the Hobbit that burgling his halls was “the most boring part of the adventure” for Bilbo, he must have been incensed! His halls are beautiful, filled with food, wine, and merriment! There was so much to steal! How could Bilbo not appreciate it? Rude!
The best part of this is picturing Thranduil getting cozy by the fireplace with a glass of wine and cracking open The Red Book of Westmarch only because he wants to read about himself, and after eight uninterrupted chapters of Not Him the silence is broken by his enraged gasp.
A new species is evolving before scientists’ eyes in the eastern United States.
Wolves faced with a diminishing number of potential mates are lowering their standards and mating with other, similar species, reported The Economist.
The interbreeding began up to 200 years ago, as European settlers
pushed into southern Ontario and cleared the animal’s habitat for
farming and killed a large number of the wolves that lived there.
That also allowed coyotes to spread from the prairies, and the white farmers brought dogs into the region.
Over time, wolves began mating with their new, genetically similar neighbors.
The resulting offspring — which has been called the eastern coyote
or, to some, the “coywolf” — now number in the millions, according to
researchers at North Carolina State University.
Interspecies-bred animals are typically less vigorous than their parents, The Economist reported — if the offspring survive at all.
That’s not the case at all with the wolf-coyote-dog hybrid, which has developed into a sum greater than the whole of its parts.
At about 55 pounds, the hybrid animal is about twice as heavy as a
standard coyote, and her large jaws, faster legs and muscular body allow her to take down small deer and even hunt moose in packs, and the animal
is skilled at hunting in both open terrain and dense woodland.
An analysis of 437 hybrid animals found that coyote DNA dominates her
genetic makeup, with about one-tenth of its DNA from dogs, usually
larger dogs such as Doberman pinschers and German shepherds, and a
quarter from wolves.
The animal’s cry starts out as a deep-pitched wolf howl that morphs into higher-pitched yipping — like a coyote.
Her dog DNA may carry an additional advantage.
Some scientists think the hybrid animal is able to adapt to city life
— which neither coyotes or wolves have managed to do on their own —
because her dog ancestry allows her to tolerate people and noise.
The coywolves have spread into some of the nation’s largest cities —
including New York, Boston and Washington — using railway corridors.
The interbreeding allows the animal to diversify her diet and eat
discarded food, along with rodents and smaller mammals — including cats,
which coywolves eat skull and all — and they have evolved to become
nocturnal to avoid humans.
The animals are also smart enough to learn to look both ways before crossing roads.
Not all researchers agree the animal is a distinct species, arguing
that one species does not interbreed with another — although the
hybrid’s existence raises the question of whether wolves and coyotes are
distinct species in the first place.
But scientists who have studied the animal say the mixing of genes
has been much faster, extensive and transformational than anyone had
noticed until fairly recently.
“(This) amazing contemporary evolution story (is) happening right
underneath our nose,” said Roland Kays, a researcher at North Carolina
State.
THIS SHIT IS SO WILD AND IT’S ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING. If you’d like to watch the entire Nature documentary referenced in that “watch this report” link, you can find the whole thing on Youtube. It’s a terrific documentary and a really interesting look at an animal most people don’t even seem to realize exists. The extent to which coywolves have adapted to urban life and the ways in which they’re very distinct from the species they’ve sprung from is pretty incredible.
IT’S MY FAVORITE GARGOYLE BACK AGAIN FOR WINTERTIME.
I want to know the exact conversation that lead to the creation of this abomination
Ye olde German architect: “ok, it’s time to put in the rainspouts and last night I was out with the lads and Hans had too much and the point is I had the FUNNIEST idea…” *Holds up drawing*
Ye olde German Architect Supervisor: * snorts beer out of his nose.* “YES. BUILD IT IMMEDIATELY.”
That’s gussy babe
Sooooo I just came back from studying in Freiburg and went on a tour of the Münster with a historian who knew all of the insider secrets and the story is even better than you think.
It took more than 300 years to build the Freiburger Münster (1200s-1500s), so they went through a lot of architects and people who paid those architects. Some of the patrons were dicks and one of those dicks lived in a house right next to the Münster. The asshat kept demanding they work faster and changed his mind every five hours about what he wanted and THEN he refused to pay the architects because he wasn’t happy with what they’d done.
That really pissed the builders off so in retaliation, the head architect built the butt gargoyle facing his house so that every morning for the rest of his life, when the dick looked out his window at the Münster, he’d have to look at a gargoyle butt.
So, the defecating gargoyle is a big fat “fuck you” to someone’s dick of a boss that has survived 500 years and two world wars
This is better than I possibly could have imagined, thank you
cant believe a bunch of english kids go through a fuckin cupboard and find a magical kingdom full of wonder and they go “yeah we’re the royal family now”
typical english behaviour
I think what’s more creepily imperialistic is the reaction of everyone in Narnia to the Pevensies.
Like, the Pevensies end up the royal family in large part because everyone’s like ‘it has been prophesied that you will come and rule us and everything will be great!’ and, well, in-universe I can’t really fault them on that; if I were a young teen or pre-teen in a completely foreign country, I too would probably just go along with whatever seem to make people friendly to me.
But the reaction of the Narnians, in almost ubiquitously welcoming these foreigners as obviously destined to rule them even though they know nothing of the country and the culture… now that is some creepily imperialist writing.
This is the only good reblog of this post in it’s entire 3 year hellscape existence
if four foreign kids popped out of a magic box and deposed trump by the express wishes of god’s fursona, i’d crown ‘em. this winter already fuckin feels like it’s lasted 100 years.
Well, fuck, there is that.
mood
“By the express wishes of god’s fursona” is both the most amazing but also the most Deeply Cursed thing I have read all year
