Rachel, 20s, Canadian. She/her. I love stories. I post art from time to time (check the artwork link). Otherwise there's mostly fandom stuff; cute animals; beautiful pictures; and random weird shit. Enjoy! =)
The vulnerability was found by an engineer named Andres Freund. Networking and quality engineering are already thankless tasks; Freund deserves better than “some microsoft engineer.”
hear me out: both the “steve is the mom friend!!” and “mom!steve is just fanon” camps are correct, but misunderstand why are they correct.
steve harrington cares aboutthe party deeply. we see it in his interactions with dustin. we see it in his pure panic when he can’t get max to respond to him at the cemetery. we see it in the way he places himself between the kids and any perceivable threat, e.g.: demodogs, billy, russian soldiers. we see it in his reluctance to go along with the kids’ dangerous plans (going to the source, using max as bait, etc. etc. etc.) and in his desire to protect them each time he’s unable to stop them and ends up in another impossible situation.
so what is steve harrington bad at? he doesn’t know how to care for the party. this doesn’t stop him from trying, but truthfully steve has never had to be the responsible adult in the room, not until dustin happened upon him after dart got loose and he was thrown into this position.
and steve’s motivations for aligning with the party are complex! it’s not just that he’s dustin’s unexpected ally, a himbo best friend who is lucky he’s pretty because nine times out of ten these fifteen year olds know more than he does. the party makes him feel important. after his fall from social grace, steve was unsure of his place in the world. his friends have turned their backs on him. his girlfriend leaves him for another guy. there’s a new alpha at hawkins high and steve feels out of place and adrift, completely lost in a world he used to rule. and then dustin finds him, and suddenly he’s in a position where he’s looked up to again. the kids admire him. more than that, they trust him to have their backs and protect them, to fight with them. and as he settles into this role, he finds that he actually loves these little misfits who will 100% be the cause of his first gray hairs. they drive him nuts! and he’d do anything for them, even though he doesn’t quite know what to do. should he have tried to contact an adultier adult when he realized how fucked max was? for sure. there’s some hubris to his actions, because he wants to stay the idol in these kids’ eyes. he gets jealous when they make a new older friend in eddie, likely worried he’s being replaced again, just like his friends replaced him with billy and nancy replaced him with jonathan. he’s scrambling to hold his place in the hierarchy, and that puts everyone at risk.
there’s also the way that fandom conflates character traits; we want to see steve as the surrogate older brother, the mom friend who carries snacks and sunscreen and extra phone chargers for everyone. he comes across as kid and warm and we feel safe in that, and want him to be the kids’ safe place.
but overall: steve loves the kids. the kids love steve. steve likes being loved. steve isn’t fully certain how to love.
i could go on about this forever but I’ve had some wine and i should probably stop before i write a whole novel about steve harrington.
i hate how they market alexa as a ‘member of the family’ like that’s SO fucking blatantly insidious and terrifying also if i wanted an untrustworthy/cold/emotionless machine in my life i’d just talk to my fuckin father
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 watched a program a little while ago that estimated what the TRex would have sounded like. They took a crocodile vocalisation, lowered the pitch and slowed down the sound (to account for the larger vocal chords) and then played the sound.
My pets had been sleeping calmly. But as soon as that noise sounded through my lounge room, all three of them leaped to their feet.
Both dogs started barking a very urgent bark that was a combination of their “something just startled me so now I’m yelling at it” bark and their “a man in a fourescent vest is trying to come through the gate” bark (they hate men in flourescent vests, especially men in flourescent vests who try to come on the property; there’s nothing they hate more). It was the most angry-scared bark I’ve ever heard from either of them. Both of them were the spikiest I’ve ever seen them, too. Hackles ALL the way up. I didnt know they could get as spiky as they did. The fur was up ALL the way down their spines and their tails were all puffed up.
And the cat had been sleeping on the couch but she freaked the fuck out at the exact same time the dogs did; hiss-spat as she flew off the couch and through the gap in the half-closed-up chimney. She didn’t come back out for over half an hour. The dogs took about that long to calm down too; they kept stalking around the house all spiky and growling at shadows and didn’t settle for ages.
And I was freaked out too. I calmed down faster than the dogs/cat did, but it freaked me out when I first heard it. I’d had the TV up high cause I was eating crunchy salad and I’d turned it up so I could hear easily over my own crunchy chewing, and sound thrummed through my whole body like a muted, creepier version of a bass note from a big-ass speaker at a concert, and something in the back of my head went, “run.” Every hair on MY body raised up, and I felt the adrenaline fire through my body. Literally I felt the roll-out of adrenaline as it pulsed out from my heart, down my limbs, and into my extremities. I’ve never felt adrenaline so acutely as that before and it was very weird and alarming.
This was at the exact same time as the dogs and cat freaked out, by the way, so its not that i set them off or vice versa. The TV show was like “this is what we think a TRex might have sounded like!” and all four of the living creatures in my lounge room said, in perfect tandem, “oh, fuck”
Here is an example for anyone interested. It really is deeply unsettling. It’s the same kind of sound they use in horror movie soundtracks. For whatever reason, we have an instinctive primal fear of low frequency sounds.
Prison guards: Iroh? Escape? Ha! That weak, senile old man couldn’t escape if we rolled a red carpet to the door!
Iroh alone in his cell:
I saw the video and thought “that guy looks like Jack Black”, then I scrolled down to read that. Yup, sure was Jack Black. Also yes, the above is actually true, his mother Judith Love Cohen did indeed help create the abort-guidance system that rescued the Apollo 13 astronauts.
Wait does this mean people are unfamiliar with this iconic post
Far worse, in my opinion, than the famous “he wouldn’t fucking say that” is “he WOULD fucking say that, as part of his facade, but you seem to think he would mean it genuinely”