tinyorchidsknits

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Bad Landing, Cornell Lab, captured by Cam Lady (Laysan albatross)

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“I woolly wuv your wool”

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Circuit Board Insect Sculptures

Dew Leaf on Etsy

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this is totally appropriate and necessary to start teaching

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So, India is dying.

Look, I know a good number of you are from the US and things aren't amazing there either, but my country is literally on the brink of collapse. So I'd love it if we could talk about that for a minute.

If you can't do anything else, please just read and reblog.

A second COVID wave has taken out the healthcare system. There are no more hospital beds. There's an oxygen shortage. There's a critical vaccine shortage. The Central Government has thrown its hands up and is passing the baton to the State Governments to do what they can.

There are over 16 million covid cases. A record 330,000 new cases reported yesterday - comparable to the US at its peak. 187,000 dead as of today.

There is no plan.

Mass cremations are taking place. The cremation grounds are running day and night and they are short on wood. People are watching their loved ones die while waiting for a hospital bed, and then they're unable to give them the proper burial rights.

Hospitals are overwhelmed. Patients are being confined, two to a bed. They're the lucky ones.

We are on the verge of people dying in the streets.

This is the second-most populous country in the world. The largest democracy. A country that encapsulates over 15,000 years of recorded human history and has endured everything from famine to invasion to colonisation.

We might be at the end. This might be the thing that does us in.

People are dying.

People are dying.

People are dying and there is no plan.

More good news? Variants are popping up. A double mutation strain has shown up. It is resistant to current vaccines. This will not go away. This is the devastation they warned of when the anti-maskers were out protesting the minor inconvenience of covering their face in public.

My country is on the verge of an emergency state. Our government has failed us. This is as dire a situation as it ever could be.

Look. I don't do much with my life. I write fics, some of you have read them and that's pretty much it. I spend my days with my head in the clouds because that's where I like to be.

But two days ago, my grandmother tested positive, had to be taken to hospital and the ambulance caught fire.

She barely made it to the urgent care she needs.

So, here I am, using whatever meager platform I have to cobble this request together. Because I have to do something.

If you can, donate.

Or spread the word.

Help. Please.

[tinyorchidsknits]

this goes so hard

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Story Time

I had a student ask for an extension on their final paper (for good reason). They just emailed me the paper with the caveat: “I changed my topic because I couldn’t get into it. I decided to write about sex instead because I could get into that.”

And I was like. Oh boy.

Except then I read the paper and y’all.

For their final, I gave students a pool of essays they could use for a research paper about mental illness in professional sports, or they could choose their own topic, based on a personal experience, that they then researched themselves.

This kid wrote about their relationship with an asexual partner, and used articles they found about the importance of communication and consent in relationships that involve individuals with different levels of sexual interest, articles about different kinds of asexual experiences, statistics about asexual individuals and sexual assault/domestic abuse, scientific articles, the list goes on. It was basically a 2-part treatise on the validity of asexuality and the fact that asexual folks can absolutely have fulfilling relationships (if they want them) with sexual folks provided there is appropriate communication.

I was touched, y’all. A., It was well-written, appropriately formatted, etc., but B., the amount of love this student had for their partner was just. So incredibly obvious. The amount of research they’d clearly done over the years, out of a desire to educate themselves and be an advocate, was really lovely to see in someone so young.

So the world may be a bit shit right now, but please know that somewhere in the midwest, there is a pair of high school sweethearts reunited over winter break who love each other very, very much.

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how the vaccine works

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[video by lets_duet_hard

original caption: my brother was renovating his mountain cabin and sent this to me 🤣🤣🤣]

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Hey so my hobby in the last week or so has been of building a giant glass ball in Minecraft, 64 block in diameter, put a wall in its centre and fill one half with water, with lava in the other. Here’s the result :

You can absolutely reblog if you like it, it’s random creation for fun that happens to be pretty

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bringing out the big guns

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THE CHILLS ALL OVER MY BODY

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But seriously, can you imagine coming from a nice date with your girlfriend, you’ve been dating for a couple of months, it’s going pretty well, and her ex is lurking outside her apartment and talking to her cat, which, while annoying is not that weird, and he seems like an ok guy, so you forget about it, and a couple of days later, you’re on a date in a nice restaurant, and the ex turns up looking like absolute shit, dunks himself into a lobster tank, eats a live lobster, and you end up having to carry him out to the hospital where he has a seizure in the MRI and so you send him home but then you get his tests back and it turns out his fucking heart and internal organs are atrophying because of a sentient parasite which your girlfriend manages to separate only the ex runs away and the parasite ends up in your girlfriend who goes to give it back to her ex and then you end up in a weird four way relationship with your girlfriend, her ex, and a symbiote that finds the word parasite offensive