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Gandalf being sent back to Middle earth because his purpose was not yet fulfilled is like if you called in dead to work and your boss was like "You're on the schedule until the end of the 3rd age we need you to be a team player. Also the shift lead quit to pursue evil doings so here's a manager uniform."

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clair de lune will always go down smooth, claude really did put his whole debussy into this one

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"A 2019 sighting by five witnesses indicates that the long-extinct Javan tiger may still be alive, a new study suggests.

A single strand of hair recovered from that encounter is a close genetic match to hair from a Javan tiger pelt from 1930 kept at a museum, the study shows.

“Through this research, we have determined that the Javan tiger still exists in the wild,” says Wirdateti, a government researcher and lead author of the study.

The Javan tiger was believed to have gone extinct in the 1980s but only officially declared as such in 2008...

Ripi Yanuar Fajar and his four friends say they’ll never forget that evening after Indonesia’s Independence Day celebration in 2019 when they encountered a big cat roaming a community plantation in Sukabumi, West Java province.

Immediately after the brief encounter, Ripi, who happens to be a local conservationist, reached out to Kalih Raksasewu, a researcher at the country’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), saying he and his friends had seen either a Javan leopard (Panthera pardus melas), a critically endangered animal, or a Javan tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica), a subspecies believed to have gone extinct in the 1980s but only officially declared so in 2008.

About 10 days later, Kalih visited the site of the encounter with Ripi and his friends. There, Kalih found a strand of hair snagged on a plantation fence that the unknown creature was believed to have jumped over. She also recorded footprints and claw marks that she thought resembled those of a tiger.

Kalih then sent the hair sample and other records to the West Java provincial conservation agency, or BKSDA, for further investigation. She also sent a formal letter to the provincial government to follow up on the investigation request. The matter eventually landed at BRIN, where a team of researchers ran genetic analyses to compare the single strand of hair with known samples of other tiger subspecies, such as the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae) and a nearly century-old Javan tiger pelt kept at a museum in the West Java city of Bogor.

“After going through various process of laboratory tests, the results showed that the hair sample had 97.8% similarities to the Javan tiger,” Wirdateti, a researcher with BRIN’s Biosystemic and Evolutionary Research Center, said at an online discussion hosted by Mongabay Indonesia on March 28.

The discussion centered on a study published March 21 in the journal Oryx in which Wirdateti and colleagues presented their findings that suggested that the long-extinct Javan tiger may somehow — miraculously — still be prowling parts of one of the most densely populated islands on Earth.

Their testing compared the Sukabumi hair sample with hair from the museum specimen collected in 1930, as well as with other tigers, Javan leopards and several sequences from GenBank, a publicly accessible database of genetic sequences overseen by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The study noted that the supposed tiger hair had a sequence similarity of 97.06% with Sumatran tigers and 96.87% with Bengal tigers. Wirdateti also conducted additional interviews with Ripi and his friends about the encounter they’d had.

“I wanted to emphasize that this wasn’t just about finding a strand of hair, but an encounter with the Javan tiger in which five people saw it,” Kalih said.

“There’s still a possibility that the Javan tiger is in the Sukabumi forest,” she added. “If it’s coming down to the village or community plantation, it could be because its habitat has been disturbed. In 2019, when the hair was found, the Sukabumi region had been affected by drought for almost a year.” ...

Didik Raharyono, a Javan tiger expert who wasn’t involved in the study but has conducted voluntary expeditions with local wildlife awareness groups since 1997, said the number of previous reported sightings coupled with the new scientific findings must be taken seriously. He called on the environment ministry to draft and issue a policy on measures to find and conserve the Javan tiger.

“What’s most important is the next steps that we take in the future,” Didik said."

-via Mongabay, April 4, 2024

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Buffy fans can have a little gaslighting

As a treat

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Actually, that's ... about normal, actually. 20 names that 90% of people share? That's more name diversity than a lot of English-speaking times and places have had! And if you had a name that wasn't one of the handful of common names (or a variation thereof, or a nickname thereof), you would get teased by your peers and people would shake their heads because what a cruel thing to do to a child, to give them a "weird" name. Sure, there have been times and places with a much wider variety of names, (Puritans, I'm looking at you), but in general, English/American culture has historically only had a few names in common use at any one time.

because I was genuinely curious, I looked up how many babies were born in 1972 in the US. About 3.2 million. Assume about half were AFAB, so 1.6 million. Of those, 63,602 were named Jennifer.

Almost 4% of afab babies were named Jennifer that year, three times as many as the next most common name.

but 71,000 of the amab babies were named Michael.

in the 70s there were:

1 Michael 707,458 Jennifer 581,753 2 Christopher 475,526 Amy 268,996 3 Jason 462,821 Melissa 253,274 4 David 445,842 Michelle 249,138 5 James 444,823 Kimberly 229,106

out of 17,107,561 male births and 16,462,535 female births according to the social security administration. If you wonder why names got weird for a while? THIS is why. GenX had like 20 names, total, for everyone.

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I saw a cool post but it was like 20 undescribed images and a screenshot of an unlinked article, so just go here and learn all about Zoozve, the quasi-moon of Venus that both does and doesn't orbit Venus and that got its name from an artist misreading his own handwriting

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Hundreds of Jewish anti-war demonstrators have been arrested during a Passover seder that doubled as a protest in New York, as they shut down a major thoroughfare to pray for a ceasefire and urge the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to end US military aid to Israel.

The 300 or so arrests took place on Tuesday night at Grand Army Plaza, on the doorstep of Schumer’s Brooklyn residence, where thousands of mostly Jewish New Yorkers gathered for the seder, a ritual that marked the second night of the holiday celebrated as a festival of freedom by Jews worldwide.

The seder came just before the US Senate resoundingly passed a military package that includes $26bn for Israel.

#palestine

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Gaza's municipality is trying to raise money to fix and restore Gaza's water system. Please support them by boosting and/or donating

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If posting fic online has taught me anything, it’s that I have no idea how the reader will react to anything. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Not the faintest clue.

Fics that I think I scribbled off just to get them out there get the kindest, most rapturous feedback. Fics I slaved over, agonized over, bled my soul into get a couple tepid replies. Fics I thought were me revealing the darkness and weird kink that lives in my brain, scared to even post it for fear of judgement, get, “Aaaw that’s so sweet!” replies. Baffling.

My conclusion? You just never know. You really just can’t know. When I did a workshop with 20 other writers I would try to guess what their critique of my story would be and I was right maybe 1 in 20 times. Only one other writer would have the same critique for my story that I had. And it wasn’t even always the same person.

The encouraging part about this is, if self recrimination, the fear that you know what people won’t like about your story, is holding you back, just say fuck it! You’re almost certainly wrong! All you can do is make it the best story you can for the energy you have. And yeah, sometimes that means scribbling it out in an evening and kicking it out to the void of the internet before you can change your mind or worry about editing it more than once because then you’ll never post it.

It’s all chaos, man. You don’t get to decide what the audience thinks. All you can do is create it and put it out there for them to decide.

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Reblog for larger sample size. Feel free to indicate in the comments your generation, approximate region of residence, your length of experience with fan fiction, or when/where you first encountered these terms.

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I love AO3 notifications that are just, like, one person leaving kudos on all your work.

Like, thank you for binge-reading my silly little stories.

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“Belka” and “Strelka”, Soviet space dogs after landing. USSR, 1960. [1800x1295] Check this blog!

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