Neptuneblueeee - Neptune Blue

something about vulture mimicry never stops being funny to me

powerful and threatening, queen of the boxes

Has anything actually gotten better, for all the work you talk about doing? Or is it just treading water in misery forever?

Anon, ten years ago gay people couldn't get married in large parts of the US. AIDS was an almost certain death sentence when I was in high school. I was looking at job boards the other day and found a part time gas station job that had health insurance as a benefit, which NEVER would have happened 15 years ago. When I was a kid, hitting your child was extremely normalized in the US and my parents were the weird ones for not doing it. There is a vaccine for chicken pox. I didn't meet anyone who had transitioned until my 20s because it was so uncommon to transition in the aughts, and now there are some states that protect your right to have gender affirming care provided by your health insurance. It's not all states, but it's better than the number of states that had it in 2010, which was zero. THERE ARE TENANTS UNIONS NOW. WE HAVE A VACCINE AGAINST CERVICAL CANCER.

And all of that has been the work of a lot of individuals and organizations and research teams and activists.

Laotian Bearded Snake (Parafimbrios lao), family Xenodermatidae, northern Thailand

Named for the ridged labial scales, which to some people look more like a mustache than a beard.

Rarely encountered.

First described in 2015.

photographs by Rupert GL

Hubble captures rare triple moon transit of Jupiter

These new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images capture a rare occurrence as three of Jupiter’s largest moons parade across the giant gas planet’s banded face. Hubble took a string of images of the event which show the three satellites — Europa, Callisto and Io — in action. There are four Galilean satellites — named after the 17th century scientist Galileo Galilei who discovered them. They complete orbits around Jupiter ranging from two to seventeen days in duration. The moons can commonly be seen transiting the face of Jupiter and casting shadows onto its layers of cloud. However, seeing three of them transiting the face of Jupiter at the same time is rare, occurring only once or twice a decade. The image on the left shows the Hubble observation at the beginning of the event. On the left is the moon Callisto and on the right, Io. The shadows from Callisto, Io and Europa are strung out from left to right. Europa itself cannot be seen in the image. The image on the right shows the end of the event, just over 40 minutes later. Europa has entered the frame at lower left with slower-moving Callisto above and to the right of it. Meanwhile Io — which orbits significantly closer to Jupiter and so moves much more quickly — is approaching the eastern limb of the planet. Whilst Callisto’s shadow seems hardly to have moved, Io’s has set over the planet’s eastern edge and Europa’s has risen further in the west. The event is also shown from start to finish in a video. Missing from this sequence is the Galilean moon Ganymede which was outside Hubble’s field of view. The moons of Jupiter have very distinctive colours. The smooth icy surface of Europa is yellow-white, the volcanic sulphur surface of Io is orange and the surface of Callisto, which is one of the oldest and most cratered surfaces known in the Solar System, is a brownish colour.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team

Looks like a drunk acrylic pouring kinda night

tumblr tuesday: some excellent art

It's been a whole week since we celebrated our creative community on a Tuesday. So here we are. That's what this is.

@z33b:

@leeshannonart:

@wrenwrought::

@telekitnetic-art:

@yixique:

@aubryjoi:

@rosebous:

@wingedog:

@trashedinpluto-jpg:

@xenodogartz:

@critterpdf:

@ghostlyfirnen:

@bugcowboyart:

@turrondeluxe:

@runicpixels:

@vaer:

@toriascreebs:

@the-meme-monarch:

@wis-art:

@mossyartworks:

@hrokkall:

@poniesart:

@chrysanthemumskies:

@butchfriend:

we all have a brickaday within us

Small town culture is knowing that there are Old Folks with strange nicknames but never knowing the stories behind them.

Of course, I made the mistake of asking why everyone calls this one guy Brickaday and it turns out that he worked at a brickyard for 40 years, stealing exactly one brick every day and making no particular efforts to conceal the theft. Nobody thought anything of it until years later he was discovered to have built three houses.

His boss is said to have shrugged and made some remarks about the importance of coming up with a plan and sticking to it.

I‘m trying to arrange my face into an appropriate approximation of silent bafflement and failing miserably.