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We’ve got an itinerant cheese-selling woman who comes into town every Friday morning to sell the cheeses she purchases from local farms, and I like this old-fashioned way of buying cheese (other people, like the mayor, find it mortifying that our village is too small to support its own cheese shop). She stations herself in the plaza and likes to share news about the farms and villages she’s visited this week (at the moment we get a lot of baby animal news, like new calf announcements.) She has the unfortunate habit of denigrating her own cheeses without meaning to because she is a cheese perfectionist. You ask for a bleu, she grimaces hesitantly and says “Ah, poor choice, it doesn’t look quite right to me today”; or you tell her “I really liked the brie I picked last time, so creamy!” and she shakes her head and goes “Ah, you got lucky, often that farmer gives me such shitty brie with a chaulky texture—” then she suddenly looks frustrated with herself, you can tell she’s thinking “why am I giving this information to a client?? I’m the worst cheese saleswoman ever.” It’s very endearing.
She also sells eggs, and always writes the name of the farmer she got it from on each carton so you can make sure to buy your friends’ eggs and avoid your enemies’ eggs. You’ve got to be like “Six Gilbert eggs please” and publicly announce where your loyalty lies, it’s a whole Thing. If one day you decide to go rogue and ask for Agnès eggs instead you can be sure people will notice, and they will talk. Getting my own chickens is the only way I have found to avoid pledging egg allegiance.
every time this post comes around, my favorite part is the “I know it’s the Mets” qualifier at the beginning lmao like how baseball that this zillion note posts starts with “sorry for putting this hellteam on your dash, bUT”
Y’all have no idea how hard I was trying not to laugh in class at that poor bird
Paleontologists completed a life-sized replica of Sue, the most complete T. Rex ever found.
And she is freaking GORGEOUS!
As I read more about this beauty, I found out some new details regarding things I thought I previously knew about the beast that was Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I’m going to share them with you.
First, and most obvious, her size:
This is nothing new, we all figured T. Rex was big, but I for one never stopped to consider exactly how big it was. Nobody ever really knows what to imagine when they read about something the size of a whale that walked around and ate everything it could kill.
Speaking of eating things, I just want to remind you all that T. Rex had–by miles–the strongest bite of any terrestrial animal living or dead, somewhere around six and a half tons of force. That’s over six times greater than the current estimate of what Allosaurus was capable of, and three times what was delivered by the highest measured reading of the living title holder–the estuarine crocodile. It didn’t have to waste time swinging its head open-mouthed like Saurophaganax for a little extra oomph, or grow fancy serrated teeth like Carcharodontosaurus to cut pieces out of its prey. It opted for the simplest approach: get its mouth around something and crush it to death; imagine the full weight of an elephant on whatever was between this thing’s jaws.
“How did it find something to eat?” I hear you asking. “It can’t see something if it doesn’t move, right?”
Listen, I love Jurassic Park too, but that’s a big crock of shit.
Notice how both her eyes face forward. That gives her binocular vision (the ability to focus both eyes on one target, like you and I). More importantly it means she has impeccable depth perception due to overlapping fields of vision from each, large, eyeball. Researchers agree that T. Rex not only had incredible vision, but that it was probably better than most modern animals–including eagles, hawks, and owls–and that she could likely spot something three and a half miles away. If something that big can see that well, it doesn’t matter if you move or not, she’d be able to tell if it was an animal trying to hide or a piece of vegetation. So pray she isn’t hungry if she lays eyes on you. And even if by some miracle she didn’t see you, she’d still smell you.
If she decided you looked tasty, you probably wouldn’t hear her coming as much as you’d feel her. Modern science indicates that T. Rex didn’t roar like in Jurassic Park, but rather bellowed or maybe even hissed like crocodilians. If she were on to you, you’d most likely feel this sense of unease creep up your spine as a low-pitched rumble in the air permeated through you. You wouldn’t know what it was or where it was coming from until you hear her footfalls. By then it’s too late–you could try to run but she’d probably catch you. There’s plenty on YouTube that reconstructs what T. Rex may have sounded like, and it’s legitimately haunting.
To wrap all of this up, the one bit of good that came out of the cursed year that is 2020 is that this wonderful child of science and art came into the world, and reaffirmed my respect and admiration for the eight ton slab of muscle and teeth that is this magnificent creature.
…and it is nothing if not magnificent.
I honestly expected like three notes, what happened!?
Palaeontologists are the ones providing the data and advice but don’t give them full credit, this life-sized sculpture was created by ARTISTS, the artist team of @bluerhinostudio
They also created this Quetzalcoatlus that made the rounds online (image credit goes to National Geographic)
As well as many more amazing sculptures and dioramas, so please check them out here on Tumblr and on Instagram
They are currently working on a new Tyrannosaurus again which will be on display in Europe (image credit goes to Blue Rhino Studio)
Please give the amazing team of Blue Rhino Studio the credit they deserve
I don’t remember if I read it on fanfiction or AO3. But all I remember is that the gang is taking a girl to their village and she gets really clingy with Inuyasha and develops a crush on him. She wants him to carry her like he does with Kagome and he does it. When they get to her village her father is the headman and asks her father to make Inuyasha marry her. And all he says is “the only person I’m marrying is that girl over there” and points to kagome 😂
disney built the biggest and most expensive animatronic ever in their history and then built a mountain around it and it BROKE a couple of months after the ride opened and it’s impossible to fix it without dismantling the entire mountain structure and that’s honestly the most hilarious verified disney fact™
ever
the second most hilarious being that the chum animatronic on the finding nemo ride at epcot used to pop out of the barrel to scare guests but one time a cast member was walking past it during an opening/closing procedure and it popped out and smacked them clean in the face so now it’s turned off permanently
TL/DR version: the structural layout of the Expedition Everest attraction is so complicated that Disney had to use a technique called “previsualisaton” to construct it - essentially a four-dimensional blueprint that specifies not only how the structure should be put together, but the exact point in time that each step should occur. That precision in timing is actually kinda critical, because if certain parts of the structure are subject to stress too early (e.g., before the concrete is fully cured, before additional supports have been installed, etc.), they’ll be permanently weakened.
Well, long story short, when the ride went into action, Disney’s engineers quickly discovered that the numbers weren’t adding up: the internal stresses the ride was producing every time they turned the animatronic yeti on were literally tearing the whole mountain apart. It’s clear that something got screwed up during construction: either somebody performed a step with the wrong timing, or in the wrong order, or the previsualisaton was messed up to begin with. The trick is, they have no idea what the actual error was - and the ride can’t be repaired until they figure out what went wrong in the first place.
So now they just point a moving strobe light at the motionless yeti to create the illusion of motion, which is why it’s been nicknamed the “disco yeti”.
When companies have too much money and need to chill
here’s an example of what the yeti looked like when it actually worked.
yo uhhhh thats fucking terrifying
THE YETI IS AMAZING and I so badly wish I could have seen it action. (Disco Yeti is my friend tho)
But this is a very important point.
The yeti is not broken.
The yeti works perfectly. But due to some calculation error
They can’t turn the yeti ON or else he’ll tear down the mountain.
So now their biggest and most impressive animatronic ever gets strobe lights flashed at it so your eye is tricked into thinking it moves.
Disco Yeti my beloved <3
they didnt build the mountain to have a ride, they built it to contain the yeti
Fun Fact, thats, more or less, something that wealthy people in China and Japan did, they were called “musical floorboards.” Designed to squeak when stood upon. A person could make noise all the way down a corridor.
The residents and servants knew which floorboards made a sound and avoided them. But a burglar, or assassin didn’t. If you heard the creaking of floorboards, you knew danger was coming.
Even better, despite what movies may show, a lot of the old west was founded by Chinese immigrants, so there could have been carpenters around who knew how to make the musical floorboards!
They were also called Nightingale Floors, and looking up to make sure I had the right term, I found they were super clever! They were more than just ill-fit boards or whatever makes floors creak normally, they actually used little metal bars under the boards placed into small holes in the boards to cause the creak.
The best things on the internet are when someone makes a joke and then Miss Frizzle rolls up for an educational adventure.
Ron and Harry hide in the wardrobe in the Hogwarts Staff Room after learning that the monster in the Chamber of Secrets is a Basilisk. They overhear McGonagall telling the staff that Ginny had been taken into the chamber by the heir, and the heir had written “Her skeleton will lie in the chamber forever” onto the wall. Ron’s younger sister was almost certainly dead. She had been taken into the Chamber of Secrets to be the prey of a giant snake that can kill people simply by looking at them. He’d seen her grow up beside him, watched her first steps, seen her ride her first broom, and now she was gone. And he learned about it standing in that cupboard. It must have been his worst fear come true. Then, the next year, a monster appears in that cupboard, feeding off the fears of everyone around it.
Then, the next boggart we see lives in the writing desk in Grimmauld Place. That place was full of traumatic moments, but I think that the boggart was created when Walburga Black realised that Regulus was missing, and probably dead. She had two sons; one she disowned for parting from his family’s beliefs. The other was her pride and joy, her youngest child, the only heir of the pureblood House of Black. And then, one day he goes out and he doesn’t come back. The house elf knows something but he can’t tell her. I think her grief and anger and fear over the realisation that not just one, but both her sonswere now lost to her is what created that boggart. I think she sat at that desk and wrote letters to everyone she ever knew asking if they had seen her son, and that boggart was created when her worst fear came true. Her son was gone and he was not coming home.
Both were created when someone’s worst fear came true. Both were created when somebody lost a loved one. Because isn’t that everyone’s worst fear?
