L Gave Words Of Support And Likes To Those Who Are Affected By The Conflict.

I tried captioning with as many creatures I could recognise

Merry Whalesfallsgiving!

Isopods

They make great mounts: they are docile, big, live long and have a very smooth gait. Not as fast as spiky legged and feisty cockroaches, but they make up for it with their ability to traverse uneven terrain and scale nearly vertical cliffs.

That said, an untrained isopod has the inconvenient habit of rolling up into a ball if it feels threatened. And it will do so with no regard for the rider sitting on top of it.

That's why the farmers who sell them as mounts start riding them as soon as they're big enough to get them used to it. Not without mishaps of course.

The Early Therocene: 30 million years post-establishment

In Plains Sight: Life in the Noderan Plains

The continent of Nodera is thriving in the beginning of the new era of HP-02017's history: the Therocene Era. New forms of hamsters have gotten bigger and bigger as time went on, and thirty million years later they have finally attained the niches of megafauna, and spread upon the continents once the land bridges became exposed during a brief period of glaciation that marked the end of the Rodentocene Era 5 million years earlier.

Today the ecosystems of Nodera have attained a diversity like never before, as enormous creatures of various clades have spread throughout its grasslands and filled numerous herbivore niches. Most prevalent are the bipedal hopping boingos, large descendants of the jerryboas that have become widespread as the predominant plains grazers, with the boldly-striped streaky zibba (Saltozebroides melanoleuca) being one such example. Another common grazer is the massive Noderan plains mison (Buffalomys noderus), the heaviest megafauna of Nodera.

Despite competition from the mison and the boingos, the hamtelopes of Nodera are also thriving in the plains. Some have evolved to become much smaller, feeding on low-growing softer plants in the plains, such as the lesser plains phonie (Equinomimus minimus), while others went the opposite route, becoming the towering long-necked girats, such as the axehorn girat (Altocervimys securiceros) which became high browsers specializing on the sparse, thorny trees that grow sporadically throughout the open grassland.

Such a wide diversity of herbivores in one same ecosystem is made possible by the unique phenomenon of niche partitioning, where each herbivore specializes in eating different plants, or different parts of the same plants, and thus can coexist with minimal competition. Tall, tough grasses grow in abundance in the Noderan plains, and the mison greatly relish the leaves- but not the sheaths and tough woody stems. Once the mison have passed, the boingos move in: with teeth adapted for abrasive vegetation they feast upon the woody stems and twigs that the mison ignore, and once the boingos too move on, the grass begins producing tender new regrowth, which small hamtelopes such as the phonies in turn feed upon.

The abundance of herbivores brings about in turn a diversity of predators, which specialize to hunt in the plains. Ratbats-of-prey such as the northern striped hawkbat (Nyctaccipiter borealis) soar above the plains seeking out small prey, such as jerryboas and small hamtelopes, while on the ground, large carnivorous fearrets, known as the carnohams, reign as the top predator of the open grassland. The largest of them, the lion-sized grassland nottiger (Pseudopanthera tigrileo), is Nodera's biggest carnivore, and specializes on hamtelopes, boingos, and the young of girats and mison, though adults are far too large for them to tackle.

This diversity is but a tiny fraction of the large new life that has dawned on the planet in the Early Therocene. In other continents and other biomes, thousands of other species thrive and evolve: all from one single species millions of years ago.

Truth

I've heard High Valyrian has no words for grandparents, is that right? And what word might exist for that role?

It sure didn't—until I created them.

There are four terms:

kekepa "father's father"

mumuña "mother's mother"

kepāzma "mother's father"

muñāzma "father's mother"

In a conlang, there are always words that aren't there because they're supposed to not be there, and words that aren't there because they haven't been created yet. That latter category is always going to be much, much larger than the former.

So, in the light of the 13 year anniversary of Steam Powered Giraffe, I decided to share a picture that was taken back in 2018, at Weekend at the Asylum steampunk festival. Last year I shared some pictures I took during the concert that evening, but this picture was taken during the day, at the photo op. I don’t believe that I’ve ever shared it before, but I just felt like it was the right time.

I don’t know if I’ll ever meet the band again, but I’ve met them 3 times by now, and this was definitely one of the highlights, though the band was absolutely lovely every time I met them. And as an added bonus, I’ll share the pictures I had taken with David in my The Spine cosplay, because, you know…. That was kind of mandatory, right?

Happy Anniversary @officialsteampoweredgiraffe ! Keep on truckin’!

The Jesus/Judas Complex

The only Good Jews are the Jews who are self-sacrificing, who will go willingly to their deaths for the salvation of others. The Good Jew, who will willingly undergo torments unto death, is the only Good Jew.

The Good Jew will absolve their murderers. The Good Jew will 'turn the other cheek'. The Good Jew will write "I still believe that people are good at heart" when being persecuted. The Good Jew will lay down and die for the comfort and education of others.

But for all other Jews who fail to attain such lofty standards?

They are betrayers, corruptors, colonizers, genociders, child murderers, blood drinkers. Capitalists and communists. Sexually depraved and yet sexless, where even the Jewish men are emasculated. They are White, yet also still Other. They are rootless cosmopolitans, from nowhere, yet told to go back where they came from. Their mere presence is a taint, and yet they hide among the disciples of the Good Jew, waiting for their chance to betray and sell out.

The only Good Jew is a Dead Jew who goes willingly to die, on the cross of the Romans or from the knives and guns of terrorists. All other Jews, who refuse to lay down and die, who dare to say "Am Yisrael Chai", that the Children of Yisrael Live, are therefore innately evil and irredeemable, and must be shunned for daring to cling to life.

I know this is such a doomer kind of attitude but I genuinely cannot stand it when people go around talking about the ‘silent majority’ when it comes to Jew hatred. There’s two main problems I have with this statement

— Sure, these people might support Jews now, but it’s probably safe to say the majority of people in the world have deeply ingrained biases against Jews. Those biases are easily exploited, easily brought out, and easily radicalised into rabid hatred. See: large swaths of leftist spaces, who honestly seemed like sleeper agents with how fast they openly admitted raping Jews is a moral thing. There’s also the issue of a lot of these silent majority people not supporting Hamas or believing in the Aryan race or thinking that Jews have no culture and we’re just stealing it from everyone else, but still tolerating those ideas being held in other people— it shows that these people neither understand nor care about the gravity of these views, which then makes those precious biases much, much easier to show

and

— The entire point of the silent majority is that they are silent. Sure, they might chat with their Jewish friends about how bad things are, they might express sympathy in private, things like that. But when push comes to shove, when Jews are being actively murdered wide scale, they don’t show up. They leave us in the dirt. They watch quietly as the Gestappo drags their neighbours away. They look away politely as their Dhimmi shopkeeper is beaten in the street for walking on the wrong side of the pavement. They close their blinds when their friend is tied to the stake and burned alive

I know it’s comforting to think of this vague concept of the silent majority, but it’s not actually reality. I know it sucks feeling like you need to have your guard up all the time (and you don’t, just be careful), it’s going to suck a whole lot more if you put yourself into a false sense of security. The silent majority are not our friends. The silent majority are not there for us. The silent majority don’t care. We can’t just live in a nebulous idea of people who quietly tut to themselves whenever they see someone saying ‘glory to the resistance’ or ‘Jews are trying to taint the Aryan race’, we need to focus on the tangible reality, and the people who are actually present

I think this is also why I, and so many other Jews, absolutely love non-Jewish allies. There’s something so indescribably amazing to see people in this world that’s been so horrible to us standing up for us, listening to us, helping us. Allies go through a lot of shit from others because they care about us, I’ve seen it so much— they’ll get vicious hate for just associating with Jews. And they still do it. They still stick with us. Because they care, and it’s just so wonderful

Spread the love to non-Jewish allies, you are so amazing. And to the silent majority, I hope you can become the help that we desperately need

10,000 IQ Deduction (EGSNP)

Nonchalant Ashley (Sketchbook)

Larry cleverly deduces that Ashley has transformed herself at the mall and hopes that no one, especially Rich, notices.

Wait, that doesn't sound right.

I don’t know if I can contain my “The Muppet Christmas Carol has better costume design than most Oscar-nominated period dramas” rant until after Thanksgiving you guys, I have…so many Thoughts