if nothing else at least ive made it to my big age of 31 without getting reflexively mad at people half my age coming up with new memes. getting genuinely mad about shit like “6 7” is one of the early warning signs of aging into a Republican
My version of “doomscrolling” nowadays is just going to iNaturalist, browsing pictures of animals and fantasizing about where I would introduce them outside of their natural range if I was some kind of ecology-focused evil scientist. I do this when I’m depressed. I don’t know if it helps.
Bring hyena to Texas put Texas in hyena paws humans can trust Texas to hyena pack yesss
How could I disagree with such a trustworthy source
animals i really want to introduce to the USA:
-red pandas in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. they can live in those you-pick orchards and delight tourists, and in the winter the big ones can be harvested by the farmers for food and fur. america also has native bamboo, as well as plenty of escaped invasives.
-koalas in southern california. we already have a lot of feral eucalpytus in the state and it makes our wildfires way worse. let’s put koalas in there too. coyotes can hunt them like dingos do.
-cheetahs in colorodo, wyoming, nebraska, and oklahoma. we had cheetahs here once, that’s why pronghorns are so fast. let’s give them something to really haul ass about.
-spotted hyenas in texas and new mexico. did you know there’s actually a shit ton of oryx already roaming around new mexico? they were brought in for a game preserve. oryx can fight off lions, but spotted hyenas are actually superior pack hunters with some of the highest kill rates of large cooperative predators in the world. we might have a problem with ranchers, but like: fuck ranchers. they already decimated the mexican wolf populations. they deserve hyenas.
-pangolins. i would drop these guys in arizona honestly. everyone in arizona hates and fears fire ants. i think entire neighborhoods would throw ecstatic parades for pangolins (which smell much better than giant anteaters) at least until a pangolin dug straight through their pasteboard condo.
-new zealand’s little penguin in louisiana. they burrow into mud and sand banks during the day and tolerate quite hot temperatures! i think they’d do fine, and louisiana is sliding into the gulf anyway. let’s have penguins there. i’d also try them out in new england in case lousiana is just too swampy for them. i feel like new yorkers would go insane with pride over having penguins around. they would act like they invented the whole concept of penguins. we should let them.
-water buffalo. georgia and the carolinas. i just think it would give everyone there some interesting new problems.
-i firmly believe that asiatic elephants would do great in the southeastern united states. it’s a subtropical climate that’s only going to get swampier as things heat up, and there’s plenty of kudzu and tall grass species for them to munch on. they’re also smart enough to learn to navigate and negotiate with people, and to follow set routes around human farms rather than tromp through them, so disruption to existing human infrastructure would be minimal but occasionally hilarious. i think it would be so cool to have an american subspecies of elephant. if i ever win the lottery this IS what i am going to be doing with my millions.
Animals I would introduce to each continent:
Europe: Wombat
We’ve had enough of your fucking rabbits and foxes. Here, have a huge badger type thing that can destroy cars with its arse. It’ll outcompete your badgers and where will you be then. Haha.
Asia: Wombat
We’ve had enough of Indian camels ruining our deserts. Here’s something to ruin your terrain for a change.
North America: Wombat
We’ve had enough of United States tourists with no manners. Here’s some tourists with even less manners.
South America: Wombat
WE’VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR FUCKING CANE TOADS. WOMBATS FOR YOU.
Africa: Wombat
The feral ostriches aren’t actually all that much of a problem right now, but in revenge for the problem they will probably become in the future, have some fucking wombats.
Antarctica: Wombat
I’ll take it right back home and warm it up I promise I. I just really want to see a wombat walk and dig in the snow.
Australia: Wombat
The populations of all three species of wombat are dangerously low.
see while the first set of animals is really selling me on the concept of an ecologically based supervillain, Derin’s wombat themed villain is showing up MUCH clearer in my minds eye
when u look at 2017 and think “oh that’s only like 3 years ago” and it’s actually 12,000 years ago and everything is gone and everyone you know has been reduced to ash and the world is completely different
I’m as grateful for cellphones as the next person, but sometimes I think about how everyone having a phone on them at all times really did cause us to loose some things as a society. I mean - for example, kids these days will never experience their car breaking down and needing to find the nearest place with a phone they can use. They’re never going to have the opportunity to tentatively approach a house only to discover that it’s full of queer people having a party hosted by a transvestite to celebrate his creation of a sex homunculus, stay the night, and loose their virginity while unintentionally partaking in cannibalism. It’s tragic, that kind of gay sexual awakening just doesn’t happen these days because of cellphones.
My favouritest sport fact ever is that in 1990s 2 cardiac surgeons watched an f1 race to save the lives of countless kids. The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) kept losing the lives of patients after successful heart surgeries. Specifically the 10-15 minutes after a bonefide clinically successful surgery patients would die:
And so the two surgeons filmed a handover after heart surgery and sent it to the Ferrari pitcrew who were told to critique and improve handover process
And from this:
we got this:
The error rate during patien handovers dropped from 30% to 10% with the F1 informed protocol.
I literally love this fact so much because being an pitcrew member is such a thankless job because theyre underpaid and overworked mechanics and they literally saved lives in this instance.
The doctors went to the race tracks to watch the car changes and the pit crews went to the hospitals and watched a live transfer and offered suggestions and they kept working with them to improve.
After there was a successful improvement of the most vital metrics of a handover of a patient from surgery to ICU, the pit crews also worked with other hospitals for other procedures and it’s now a whole thing of trying to apply the specialized, streamlined and speedy teamwork and nonverbal coordination of pit crews to other high-risk fields.
This is a perfect example of how two very different fields of knowledge meeting can make a huge leap forward in progress.
hey, I went to Mad At You Island and it wasn’t empty. there was a stranger you were a bit curt with on a bad day, an old friend who you got into a falling out with, a labmate who’s experiment you messed up by mistake, someone who’s birthday you forgot, an internet stranger who is hellbent on deciding you’re not morally good enough for not reblogging a post or not following a one day boycott. and it is kind of mortifying to realise that Mad At You Island will never be uninhabited, but it’s just a fact of life. and if you try to reduce the population to zero, you’ll end up whittling yourself down to nothing
this is completely true, and you know what else? i’ve actually visited Mad at You Island a few times, and while it’s never empty, the turnover rate is pretty high. most people only pop in for a minute or two at a time, a couple of hours at most. in most cases, they have better things to do with their days then sit and stew on Mad at You Island. and while there are certainly exceptions, in general, if you are someone who does your best to communicate openly and listen well and be decent to other people, then most of the time, folks you find lingering for ages on Mad At You island probably got lost on their way to Mad At Myself Island. that’s a bummer for them, because it sucks in both those places, but that’s neither your fault nor your problem.
though i once would not have believed this, it’s okay to let people go to Mad At You Island. it is, in fact, one of the great joys of life to reach the day where you see someone set off for that desolate hellscape and, with delighted relief, realize, “my god! i don’t have to follow them.”
Just like, don’t become part of the landscape on someone else’s Mad At You Island.
being a female knight fucking sucks. every squire boy i get turns out to be an adult woman with short hair who’s just in it to sensually strap my armor to me. CHOP CHOP bitch the French are trying to sack our castle!
ALT
