Rachel 𓄂

She/they. Your crazy, queer, fandom aunt. © 1997

[Rachel 𓄂 @thycatlady]

iT's NoT a PhAsE mOm!!! (Taken over the span of 2 years. Maybe I look more grown up? Moved from my purple princess room to my beige "adult" apartment?) https://t.co/q2rE86b8Ls

[々 @ayospawned]

If you were a fish at an aquarium, I'd read your entire little information plaque and stand there way too long watching you swim around so you'd know you were my favorite.

[evan loves worf @esjesjesj]

Zohran saying “we’re gonna give food to kittens and puppies” is such an amazing trap for the right. He’s the socialist Muslim Sun Tzu

[pat 2: cruise control @ranmasaotome96]

Goodbye Google Chrome

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

America burned Japan's first gift of cherry trees. All 2,000 of them, on President Taft's direct order.

The 1910 shipment arrived in DC crawling with insects and nematodes. Agriculture inspectors condemned the lot, Taft signed off on the bonfire, and the State Department braced for a diplomatic disaster. Tokyo's mayor, Yukio Ozaki, responded by sending 3,020 more, grafted from the famous grove along the Arakawa River.

Those trees have spent a century paying the friendship back.

Four days after Pearl Harbor, vandals chopped down four of them. Park officials renamed the survivors "Oriental" cherry trees for the rest of the war to protect them from axes.

Then came the twist. By 1952 the original Arakawa grove in Tokyo, the parent stock, had nearly died from wartime neglect. Japan asked Washington for help. The Park Service shipped budwood from DC's trees back across the Pacific and restored the grove that created them. When a flood wiped out more Japanese trees in 1982, horticulturists took 800 fresh cuttings from the Tidal Basin.

These 250 new trees solve a real problem too. The Tidal Basin is sinking, and a $133 million seawall rebuild forced crews to rip out roughly 150 trees. Japan offered replacements before anyone asked, timed to America's 250th birthday.

So the genetics run in a loop. Tokyo's grove seeded Washington's. Washington's saved Tokyo's. The saplings going in this spring descend from both.

114 years of diplomacy, running on grafted branches.

[techniacus @Techniacus]

You don't have to accept statements like this.
An example: My wife loves fireflies but we noticed there weren't as many around anymore. So I did a little research, found out how to attract more to our yard, and now a few years later our yard is packed full of them.
You can affect the world for more than you realize

[Bobbi @kittenaround_51]

Just a momma and her baby frolicking in the stream.
I often wonder if they have memories like we do since they do remember people and places.

[Akameli @Akamelili]

𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔩𝔞𝔰𝔱 𝔲𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔬𝔯𝔫 ⚜️ Then her eyes were opened, and she realized she was naked.

[Archaeology & Art @archaeologyart]

Joanna Karpowicz — The Fox's Wedding (Anubis Meets Yōkai)

[beck @unrivaled]

gotta marry a new yorker so i can get dual citizenship to mamdanistan

[Liam Nissan™ @theliamnissan]

Yup

[Nico The Lowly Tarnished @Nicosaesthetic]

The funniest part about the world rallying behind Zoran Mamdani is that he’s literally just doing his job, but by doing so shows us that every other politician is just lining their pockets & leaving us to rot 😭

[Jett 🜲 @iky_fwjett]

Generations ago, women went to therapy
and men made fun of them.

Women took that knowledge to their friends circle, and men made fun of them.

Women changed their processes, and men made fun of them.

And men, who never went to therapy, never worked on themselves, never learned to question themselves, who never learned how to build a support network or love themselves, are killing themselves and their solution is for women to make it better in a way that men don't have to change.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Some of y’all aren’t scared enough about running out of potable water. We need it to survive, our pets and farms do too. Data centres are using it up and wasting it. They project we could run out by 2039. Thirteen years. Stop asking AI questions, it’s not worth it.

[Alex Toledo 👑🏳️‍🌈👑 @alejilloTol]

Me apareció en recuerdos la foto que fue LA FOTO del pride de 2024: un señor portugués abrazando una bandera LGBT.
El señor estaba parado en la puerta de su casa viendo pasar la marcha en Porto, sosteniendo una bandera portuguesa lo cual inicialmente asustó a varios porque agitar la bandera nacional en ese contexto puede ser señal de protesta nacionalista anti-LGBT. La gente en la marcha se detuvo, preocupada por lo que podría pasar. Pero resulta que el señor estaba agitando la bandera portuguesa porque no tenía una bandera arcoíris y quería participar de alguna forma.

Una chica llamada Lily se acercó. El hombre intercambió su bandera portuguesa por la bandera que Lily traía sobre los hombros. Lo que ven en la foto es el momento exacto en que él la recibe y la abraza.

Alguien se sintió visto y parte de algo más grande ese día. Eso es el orgullo: dejar de ser invisibles. 🏳️‍🌈❤️✨

[Nashville Zoo @NashvilleZoo]

Stand with us to protect the future of Nashville Zoo.

A proposed 69,000-square-foot data center is planned next to the Zoo, but no environmental impact studies have been conducted. Sign our petition to help protect the animals in our care ➡️ https://t.co/q2ISQnxLBK

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A psychologist watched thousands of couples argue for 40 years. The ones who stayed together and the ones who divorced fought just as much. How often you fight barely predicts anything. The clearest warning sign is quieter: one partner rolling their eyes at the other.

His name is John Gottman. He wired couples up to heart monitors, filmed them fighting, then waited years to see who broke up.

The couples who lasted shared one habit. For every cold moment in a fight, a snap, a jab, a nasty look, they had about five warm ones. A joke, a hand on the knee, a quiet "okay, fair." When they were getting along, the warm stuff outweighed the cold by far more. The couples heading for a split were running close to even, more digs than make-ups. The warmth around the fight is what held them together.

The worst sign of all is contempt. That word covers eye-rolling, sarcasm, mocking how your partner talks, treating them like they are stupid or beneath you. Gottman could watch a couple fight for fifteen minutes and guess who would divorce with about 90% accuracy, mostly by counting moments like that. Plain old anger barely registered. Some of the couples who yelled the loudest turned out to be the happiest, as long as they were kind to each other the rest of the time.

There is also a physical reason the calm conversation he wants is nearly impossible in the heat of a fight. When your heart races past about 100 beats a minute, your body drops into survival mode, and the part of your brain that listens and feels for someone else goes quiet. Gottman called it flooding. Your body needs a full twenty minutes to settle, and only if you stop replaying the fight in your head. Loving someone does not switch off the adrenaline.

Most of what couples fight about never gets fixed anyway. Around 69% of it comes from the basic ways two people differ, in personality and in what they want out of life, and that does not change. Happy couples have the same three or four arguments for thirty years. They just stop trying to win and learn to argue without cutting each other down.

So the line in the tweet has it backwards. A couple that never fights is often the one quietly falling apart. Usually it means one person stopped speaking up, and the warmth drained away while the room stayed calm.

[Archaeology & Art @archaeologyart]

Between 1856 and 1859, Emily Mary Madden, then aged eight to eleven, dedicated a small notebook to her family's cat, Mouton.

The strokes are clearly a child's, but the eyes, whiskers, fur, and the dark hatching on the tail are carefully detailed.

Across the pages, Mouton encounters an elephant, appears before the queen, rides a rooster, tangles with mice, and takes up arms against a spider.

Mouton was actually a French tomcat given to Emily's father, Sir Frederic Madden, by a bookseller in 1854. Frederic was a distinguished paleographer and librarian who worked with manuscripts at the British Museum.