Pinned
PUTTING THIS NOTE BACK AGAIN (after i had just taken down my last pinned freak-out sigh)
For what it's worth, you can find me as XCZIEL almost everywhere: bluesky, discord, dreamwidth, pillowfort,twitter i never use... [now deleted]i even still have my livejournal (i am not, however, on insta or the ticking tok site)
feel free to message me if you'd like to keep in touch should tumblr continue it's current trajectory (exploding car. hammers everywhere.)
_
"You could get up early and do it before work" I could also wait for a magic beanstalk to start growing in my living room LMAO. Let's focus on things that happen in the real world
To this day I still don't believe that anyone actually thought you could generate infinite chocolate via an optical illusion. That's a thing people tell themselves to feel superior
The defining feature of tumblr is not "the website where people actually think infinite chocolate is possible", it is defined by a group of people refusing to break kayfabe, another group being genuinely confused by an optical illusion (NOT the same thing as thinking infinite chocolate is possible) and a third group who is certain they are a lot smarter than the other two.
I can't be the first to make this connection
y'all slept on the first chart but I will make the world see my vision
...Can I add this
#mypole
“you can’t hate ICE agents for wanting a fat paycheck” ah yes. people who are willing to disregard all morals for cash. congratulations you played right into their hands you uneducated piece of shit
you couldn’t pay me an amount even feasible to do this evil shit. you are lower than dirt
This. You can and should judge people for working for ICE, they're people who willingly signed up for an American secret police force that's violating the rights of people constantly in order to act as enforcers of a fascist government.
Basically everyone is not an ICE agent. Like, virtually all of us, the entire population, are not ICE agents. No matter how steep our bills are, very nearly every single American is not an ICE agent.
We can, and should, judge them forever. It should be the sort of thing their grandkids are ashamed to discover. The sort of thing that hamstrings a career forever. "What were you doing in 2025-26? Oh, you were with ICE? Thank you for your time, get out right now."
They should all be judged and shunned for the rest of their lives.
The funniest thing I've learned in the last day is that the "$50K bonus" only pays out after 5 years of service.
Like, lmao, you thought Trump was gonna give you a big chunk of cash? Silly.
I just realized that homeschooled evangelical christian kids aren't allowed to have a dinosaur phase and made myself sad
Oh no, they are. They very much are. The stories I could tell you...
Oh no...please do!!!
Buckle up.
So most creationists aren't what you see in Arrested Development where they think dinosaur fossils are fakes planted by Jews. Those freaks do exist, but they're a wacky fringe even among creationists. The flat earth kind that other creationists write whole articles distancing themselves from.
The majority of creationists, the ones who sell books and open theme parks, love dinosaurs. It's an obsession. They see them everywhere. Weird vaguely described creature in the Bible? Dinosaur. Dragon legends around the world? Also dinosaurs. Grendel? Dinosaur. Any ambiguous literary reference or ancient carving that could conceivablly be compared to a dinosaur is taken as evidence that non-avian dinosaurs lived much more recently than They want you to believe. It's not uncommon for them to think they're still out there, in fact. Most dinosaur or pterosaur cryptids are perpetuated by creationists. They go on missions to Central Africa to spread the gospel and hunt for living sauropods. Missions plural. They keep doing this. They bring dinosaur books as well as Bibles and have the local villagers point out which ones they recognize.
Of course, there's a racist element to this part because an African villager pointing out a dinosaur is only remarkable if you assume they're ignorant of paleontology or the pop culture around it. But they're not. They have TV and internet. They've seen Jurassic Park. But they know the weird white people go apeshit when they draw a sauropod with a stick in the mud for their camera crew.
They've created a whole mythology for dinosaurs with entire museums devoted to their lore. I remember a traveling exhibit I saw as a kid that speculated about how dinosaurs were brought on Noah's ark as babies to save space. They had a replica based on supposed eyewitness accounts of the ark on Mt Ararat. How a wooden structure survived for thousands of years, I don't know, but that's the least of their worries.
That's nowhere near the most elaborate example either. There's a whole Ark Encounter theme park where you can go inside a life-sized model of the ark and see museum quality dinosaur models in pens accompanied by completely made-up info about how Noah cared for each animal. They also have dioramas of dinosaurs fighting giants in an arena because we all remember that part of the Bible.
The guy who created this masterpiece is Ken Ham, who was also responsible for Genesis 3D, which was, as the name suggests, going to be a 3D animated retelling of the book of Genesis. Whether or not they planned on including the story of Onan is unclear, but they had people crowdfund individual scenes, and one of them was "Adam meets the Apatosaurus."
Ken Ham is a rock star in the creationist world, most famous for debating Bill Nye. Other greats include Ray Comfort of "behold the atheist's nightmare" fame, Duane Gish after whom the "Gish gallop" debate tactic was named, and Kent Hovind, AKA "Dr Dino" who believes peach pits cure cancer and was arrested for tax evasion. I'm not as familiar with him, but @gailyinthedark could probably fill you in. All of these people have devoted most of their careers to imaginatively reconciling the existence of dinosaurs with young earth creationist ideology.
TL,DR: most homeschooled evangelical kids are allowed and even encouraged to have dinosaur phase, if not a lifelong dinosaur obsession, it's just going to be way weirder than most people's.
I forgot an important piece of lore: the Chinese fake fossil trade.
See, the earliest known examples of feathered dinosaurs (except Archaeopteryx but we'll circle back to that) were discovered in China, hence their names like Sinosauropteryx, Sinornithosaurus, Dilong, etc. So creationists don't like that because they've been cheerfully maintaining for years that there is no connection between dinosaurs and birds because no dinosaur fossil up to that point has preserved any trace of a feather. So naturally, they deny these fossils are genuine. Conveniently for them, there are shady fossil peddlers in China who have sold fakes. In reality, paleontologists are very aware of this and are highly skeptical of any Chinese fossil that wasn't directly dug out of the ground. But that ambiguity is enough for the creationists to spin a narrative that the "evolutionists" are conspiring with the evil Chinese fake fossil mafia, like how they use the Piltdown man (another famous hoax that was never widely accepted) against human evolution but probably more racist. I'm not sure how this narrative developed after feathered dinosaurs started turning up elsewhere like in Madagascar and North America. In any case, they still deny dinosaurs had feathers and the Ark Encounter's dromaeosaurids are notably naked.
They have two schools of thought regarding Archaeopteryx: one holds that it's a fake made by adding feathers to a Compsognathus fossil (despite the only superficial resemblance between the two), while the other accepts its existence but denies any relation to dinosaurs and chalks all saurian characteristics up to coincidence. It's a just a bird, guys. God gave it a recognizably deinonychosaurian skeleton for the aesthetic.
Given the blatant contradictory nature of these two "theories," this is a highly divisive issue within the creationists community with some online creationist book stores refusing to carry books that perpetuate the hoax model. I haven't followed creationist theory in some time by now, but I'm curious as to how they're handling the dinosaur-bird thing in light of more recent evidence.
Two more big lore drops:
1) All animals, including theropod dinosaurs, were created as herbivores.
Here is an illustration from Paul S. Taylor's The Great Dinosaur Mystery and the Bible (yes, that is an actual title):
For those using screen-readers, it depicts two Dilophosaurus (the dinosaur that killed Nedry in Jurassic Park) munching on veggies.
At the time (1989), Dilophosaurus was thought to have thin, delicate crests and very weak jaws. The conventional explanation for this was that it specialized in small prey like fish and lizards. Michael Crichton got more creative in Jurassic Park, famously speculating that Dilophosaurus was venomous.
Creationists, on the other hand, took this as evidence that Dilophosaurus, along with all other theropods, was created as a herbivore.
See, creationists take every word of the Bible super literally (except for the ones that don't support their theology), so when Genesis 1:30 says "and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat," they take it as fact that all animals are naturally vegan and carnivorism is a result of Adam's curse.
To prop up this extraordinary claim, they point to living herbivores with sharp teeth like fruit bats, gorillas, and pandas. What they miss is that only the canines of these animals are sharp. Their food-processing teeth are still adapted to chew vegetable matter. They don't in any way compare to the blood-letting teeth of a carnosaur or the bone-crushing jaws of a tyrannosaurid.
2) Fire-breathing hadrosaurs.
Let me circle back to the dinosaur-dragon connection as well as influential creationist Duane Gish.
Gish had a remarkable theory about the origin of the fire-breathing dragon myth. Leading experts hold the opinion that fiery breath originated as a symbol of the fires of hell or simply volcanic activity, but such abstract symbolism is beyond the literal mindset of the creationist. Gish set out to kill two birds with one stone and solve the mysteries of the fire-breathing dragon and what hadrosaurs did with their crests.
That's right, he posited that the hollow chambers in these crests acted as combustion chambers like those on a bombardier beetle.
Here we have an illustration by Earl and Bonita Snellenberger from Gish's Dinosaurs by Design of a Parasaurolophus immolating an attacking Ceratosaurus. The anachronistic nature of the encounter is the very least of our problems.
This would have no doubt been spectacular to witness in those dinosaur arena battles depicted in the Ark Encounter.
yes good.
Federal prosecutors have launched a criminal probe Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, according to The New York Times.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., is investigating “the central bank’s renovation of its Washington headquarters and whether Mr. Powell lied to Congress about the scope of the project,” the Times reported, citing officials briefed on the matter.
Ernst Bloch, "Critique of Propaganda," 1937, translated by Chrysa Katsogridaki, published by CrisisCritique:
Perhaps people want to be deceived, certainly not bored... After a communist orator, who was addressing the employees, had presented his figures, statistics, and some final resolutions in the usual terminology, before a completely indifferent, indeed weary audience, the Nazi orator jumped to his feet, swept away the numbers with a wave of his arm, and exclaimed: “Your orator spoke of numbers, the same numbers you spend all day working with on the adding machine; I, however, speak to you of Germany’s happiness and greatness, and I speak on a higher authority.” Immediately, the circuit was closed; the audience accepted all the ensuing nonsense, listened to the promises, felt their anti-capitalist longing ignite, along with their private desires for revenge, and was carried away into the abyss. The Nazi played the piano of seduction with technical mastery, and only gradually did its effect diminish... ...even the truth, in its directly presented, let alone in its powerless and skeletal form, fails to penetrate... trickery can be a kind of theft, not in terms of its deceptive glare, but in terms of its brightness, its reflection in the puddle; for the lie has no light of its own. In short, truth itself demands, in its appropriate fullness and pedagogical mediation, that it not only exists and becomes, but also shines... Truth does not entice, certainly not, but it woos and affects; it does not dazzle, but it becomes ingrained over time; truth especially is full of form... The Nazis spoke deceitfully, but they spoke to people; the socialists quite truthfully, but only about things; what matters now is to speak completely truthfully to people about their things.
You ever see something innocuous, minding its own business on the clearance shelf at Michael’s and before you know it, it takes over your life for a few weeks?
So it was with this desktop greenhouse.
I took it home and after taking an appropriate time to “season” my idea in my mind (read: a month or two) I set to make my vision of a mini botanical garden a reality.
I started by removing the heavy glass panels and building a raised floor above the latch. I wanted to use the base as a foundation on the building.
I wrapped the foundation in plastic stone textured flooring (meant for Christmas villages) and built a pond at one end of the same. I then gave it a more realistic paint job and designed a rough layout for my plants and displays.
I also knew I wanted to make the ironwork significantly more intricate, but I wasn’t sure how just yet…
Up next - PLANTS! I went wild making all kinds of plants. Some were specific species and some were more conceptual.
I made several trees with polymer clay and moss, cacti out of beads and flocking, cattails out of raffia, hot glue and coffee grounds, and giant monstera leaves out of paper and wire.
This part should have taken me a long time, but it really came together fast. I loved finding ways to replicate natural shapes and patterns using bits of this and that.
I did make adjustments to my plans as I went like eliminating benches in favor of a simpler overall design.
Then I needed to fill my pond with water. For this I used resin. Lily pads were added to the top layer, and I wired in simple LED fairy lights. The batteries are kept in the box under the foundation.
In a weekend frenzy I added more plants, metal (paper) steps, new (plexi)glass windows, a roof, wrought-iron vines (paper again), doors that open, and a hose reel disguising the latch. Suddenly, a project I thought would take months was finished…
I love my desktop botanical garden. Right now it sits on a simple lazy Susan in my office. But I’d love to get it a proper display box to protect from dust.
Thank you for coming on this little journey with me. This piece packs a lot of joy into a tiny space. I always love building miniatures, and I’ll be doing more in the future I’m sure.
