Airk Tanthalos Appreciation Post

Don’t name horror movies stuff like “Calibre” or “Us” anymore. Name them like an academic paper “Lost in the Woods in Sweden: How Some Hikers Really Fucked Up”

Did you know that you can donate to help Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center? Not only that, you can also "adopt" a bat! "Adopt" as in the bat you choose stays in the center, but you help it via donations and get regular updates on your bat. How cool is that!

COVID is slowly becoming a “third world” disease. While first world countries are hoarding vaccines, having doses for populations many times their size, third world countries can’t get any because pharma companies want to sell to the first world countries first. Even then, first world countries will receive them first. While rich countries recover from COVID, they will forget about the pandemic while many other countries live the absolute worst moment of the pandemic without being able to vaccinate their population.

Today we learned that conches, the sea-dwelling mollusks who live inside those big, beautiful conch seashells in warm tropical waters, peer out at the world with cartoonish eyes on tiny eyestalks. They see you. They see everything. And what’s more, they can regenerate their peepers should they happen to lose one or both of them.

“One 1976 paper dug into the specific behind these animals’ alien eyestalks. Sitting at the tips of long stalks, they contain retinas with both sensory cells and colored pigment cells. But the story gets weirder because obviously, it gets weirder. After amputating the conchs’ eyes, a fully-formed replacement took its place 14 days later. Humans, we really are losing this evolutionary game.”

But wait, that’s hardly the only surprising set of eyes under the sea. Scallops have eyes too, LOTS of them:

Conch photos by Redditor buterbetterbater and via @shingworks.

[via /r/pics and Gizmodo]

ukrainian soldiers are sieged in central kherson! by ukrainians locals. 11.11.2022

you should always be careful when you fall back asleep again after waking up because sometimes you will just have a pleasant little snooze but sometimes you'll get trapped in TIME PRISON. unfortunately there is no way to predict this.

Keep talking about Belarus!

Belarus has been a dictatorship for many, many years, but it was never this gruesome, this... real. In case you didn't know, Lukashenko has been in office since 1994, he changed the constitution to be able to do it. The elections have been widely known to be falsified for years, getting lukashenko 80% or 90% of votes each and every time, although his real support is estimated to be realistically around 3%, and it could be even lower now, since he still denies the very existence (existence, not seriousness!) of coronavirus.

On the 10th of august, another election took place. To no surprise, 3 of his main opponents have suddenly been arrested and disqualified from the election in the last weeks and, as you could expect, he won again with 80% of votes.

So people have gone to the streets. Lukashenko is apparently hiding in Turkey. It's hard to organize, to communicate or to even document what's happening due to all of the internet being completely down.

Rhe police is shooting people, using tear gas and actual grenades on the masses. A cop van drove into the crowd from the behind running multiple people over. There's a lot of blood, ambulances, and possible dead, (UPDATE: one confirmed dead) though it's really impossible to know, as there are little to no news sources available in Belarus, especially with the wifi being down.

The belarussian police, or militia, is an organization working not only obviously unethically, but illegally too - people are mass-arrested without an open cause, beaten, held in arrest for days, and killed. Just yesterday a man's entire arm was ripped off in some kind of explosion. (This is not confirmed, second-hand relation). Nothing quite of this scale happened since the 90s, or possibly ever in the modern history of Belarus. Belarussians are finally demanding change, and really, what can the police do against a whole nation?

I wish I could reffer everyone to some kind of petition, charity organization, anything, but the events are so current that it's hard for me to say how people from other countries could possibly help. All I can do is raise a little awareness of what's happening, so please, keep reading, keep yourselves updated and informed and don't forget belarus.

My favorite version so far.Beautiful music,obviosly, but also beautifully acted and staged.The “messenger”part actually made me cry in class ,something I haven’t done since I was 14.

Monteverdi’s l'Orfeo, conducted by Jordi Savall, performed by Le Concert des Nations, La Capella Reial de Catalunya, and soloists.

I am so fond of this version, from the elegant set to the instrumentalists (crisp and full of vigour) to the warm and frankly imperfect singing. But what really makes it is Mr Savall’s entrance. The drums and brass start playing, and there he goes, striding down to the pit in his billowing robes. Jordi, you magnificent bastard!