Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel, Cricket In An Armchair, 1911

@onenicebugperday

ancient dog names, courtesy of ovid

It should be added that these all occur in one short passage as they eat their master Actaeon.

The park and the angel of death (1890) by Gustave Moreau

my favorite genre is “kitchen sink” tbqh. yes i want your metaphysical space opera Gothic haunted house horror-comedy. yes i want your medieval road trip heist mystery. give me time traveling werewolves and noir detective robots teaming up to fight alien supervillains. i want this sundae with every topping in the shop

This post expresses my desires. Give Me The Weird

Something More Than Night by Ian Tregillis - pitch-perfect noir mystery set in dystopian Heaven, also there are time slips

Yiddish for Pirates by Gary Barwin - super Jewish historical fiction featuring the Spanish Inquisition, star-crossed lovers, and Caribbean piracy, as narrated by an African Grey parrot

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin - New York City becomes self-aware and embodied in the minds of select, random people, is instantly attacked by Lovecraftian entity, starts with battle against tentacle monster that’s won with an umbrella and an antique taxi to give you some idea.

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn - alien first contact in medieval Germany, features quantum drives, the synchronicity of medieval philosophy and scientific knowledge, a battle against the town down the mountain, and the Black Death

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire - found family, telepathy, time travel, alchemy, deconstruction of portal fantasies, ancient Greek ideas about math, music, and the nature of the universe, and also a spin on Frankenstein

His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik - alternate Regency England where they have a dragon air force (but so does Napoleon). Continue the series to get international travel and the dragons unionizing to get their “human” rights.

Among Others by Jo Walton - epistolary boarding school coming of age novel that doubles as a classic SF rec list and also there are fairies and the MC can do magic

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson - science fiction with super-advanced nanotech where everyone lives in gated community-countries based on Aesthetic™ and also there’s an orphan girl who gets a talking book (made by Neo-Victorians) that changes her life

Child of a Hidden Sea by A.M. Dellamonica - new adult portal fantasy about a nature photographer, with coming-of-age vibes, magic, a water world where almost everyone lives on tall ships, and ecological themes

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde - mystery novel set in a 1980s with rampant literary fandom, cloned dodos, an apparent national dislike of toast, featuring a detective who’s tasked with rescuing Jane Eyre from a terrorist who wants to erase it from history, and that’s only skimming the surface of the weirdness

These sound great

Missing the best one here- Dan Simmon’s Hyperion.

“Here’s how I described HYPERION to my book club (warning: some mil spoilers): “First (and best) of the Hyperion tetralogy. Far-future setting. Structured on the model of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , the main characters, while traveling through space on a pilgrimage to investigate a cosmic anomaly in the shadow of an impending galactic military invasion, take turns relating their own personal narratives; each chapter is thus in a different literary style and genre (but the pilgrims’ various stories all end up converging and inter-relating more closely than those of Chaucer’s pilgrims do). Elements featured include: a hard-boiled cyberpunk female detective; Zen Buddhist A.I.s; a Rabbi’s daughter who starts aging backward, forgetting one more day of her past each day; a character who repeatedly tries to die but keeps getting forcibly resurrected by parasitic alien tech; enormous trees the size of spaceships that are in fact used as spaceships by environmentalist Templars; two lovers aging at different speeds owing to relativistic time dilation; articulate dolphins mourning the extinction of sharks; a Catholic priest dealing with the implications of discovering crucifixes on an alien planet; a diplomat who plays Rachmaninoff on the piano on a balcony of his spaceship while force fields fend off rainstorms and curious dinosaurs; a time-traveling robot with a taste for impaling people for some Very Important Reason; and a resurrected John Keats. In short, a wild ride.”

“Many freeze-thaw cycles over several days caused ice to form and recede, leaving ridges that resemble contour lines.” -Mary Anne White

unrestrained autumn fun

I made yeto’s pumpkin/goat cheese/salmon soup and it’s changing my life a little bit, like holy SHIT this yeti knows what he’s doing

heyyyyy it’s october again which means it’s time for

I had posted a recipe in the comments last year, but I decided to make a better version

Ingredients:

Step 1) Preheat oven to 400°F/204°C. Slice and deseed kabocha

Step 2) coat the pumpkin in a thin layer of olive oil. Season with thyme (I like dried thyme but fresh is better!), ground nutmeg, paprika, red pepper flakes, salt & pepper.

Bake for 30-50 minutes until it’s soft enough to scoop off the rind with a spoon. Thinner kabocha might only take 30 minutes, and thicker kabocha (like below) or a cake pumpkin may take 40+ minutes.

note: if your kabocha/pumpkin is especially thick, your soup may end up tasting sweeter. If you want it more umami, use less of your chosen gourd or maybe add a splash of soy sauce to the broth? Haven’t tried that but it’d probably work

Step 3) Prep all your other veggies while you’re waiting for the pumpkin to bake. Dice the onion and set it aside. Chop the celery & carrots into Chunks and mince the garlique

Step 4) Wait until the timer for the pumpkin has 20 minutes or less left. Heat up your pot/dutch oven on high/med-high heat, melt 2 tbsp of butter, and add the onions. After about 6 minutes, add the garlic. After another few minutes, sprinkle flour and stir, and keep frying until it browns.

Step 5) Add the rest of the butter, the rest of the veggies, and stir. Deglaze the pan with a splash of mirin/cooking wine.

If you timed it right, the pumpkin should be about done. Using a spoon, scoop the rind off the pumpkin. While you do that, periodically check on the veggies, adding another sprinkle of flour and a some of the fish stock as it gets dry. It’ll create a sort of paste and the onions will be pretty browned at this point.

Step 6) Chop the pumpkin & add it to the pot. Add the rest of the stock. If you’re using habanero, slice it and add it now. Add any other seasonings (it may need more salt) to taste. Once the soup boils, turn the heat to low and cover.

Personally, I prefer soups with Chunks in them + I think it’s more authentic to what the yeti made, but if you REALLY feel compelled to blend your soup, do it now.

Step 7) While the soup is heating up, get out a frying pan and add a tablespoon or two of some olive oil/butter on med-high heat. Add the salmon filet to the pan (scale side down) and just let it sit there. Don’t touch it. When it turns opaque halfway up, flip it until it’s fully cooked.

Once it’s cooked, remove it from the pan, remove the skin, and shred it into bite size pieces. If your salmon was really thick like mine was, and some parts of it are still pink, then toss the pink parts back in the pan to let them cook a little longer.

Add the salmon to the soup.

Step 8) Once the soup has been simmering for a few minutes and you’re too impatient to keep waiting, remove it from heat, add the goat cheese & heavy cream, garnish with gronions or whatever herb of choice, and enjoy!

In the game, this soup restores eight hearts, and it truly does feel that replenishing. This soup could cure any disease.

Wooooahdude I just found this out but you're heirloom tomatoes actually. Did you know this

Because you're so

Fucking killer story map from NPR. A+++

This is fantastic!

One important takeaway from this article, if you're a gardener, is that there's a corresponding Heat Zone Map put together by the American Horticultural Society that isn't widely known.

They're trying to implement this info more in the Hardiness Zone map, but trying to account for too many factors in a single metric runs the risk of muddling the metric, so it's worth considering them separately.

hmm

dragonflies. haunting implications:

they should do emmys for gifs

lets all stare at this plant yeah?

im going to drink a $7 light beer at the zoo and become the jane goodall of leafcutter ants

Kill you stupid fucking

fuckin bee brother thats a big ass bee