Ftr I Am Forever Going To Be Bitter That The Post I Wanted To Be "let's Talk About Extinct Ecosystems

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Alien Pose Prompts

I was thinking about how it can be difficult to figure out our own creatures' anatomies because there are no direct references to draw from, and how I tend to draw my aliens in the same poses, and boom, this happened. Prompts to practice and push the limits of your alien's anatomy :) Aimed at sophonts, but a lot of them can apply to non-sapient beasties too.

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Sleeping lightly or having a nap

Sleeping deeply after an exhausting day

Scratching an itch in a hard-to-reach place

Carrying an infant

Carrying another grown individual

Holding a piece of food

Sipping a liquid

Reaching for something high up

Making themselves as small as possible

Freezeframe of moving at topspeed

Relaxed, half resting position e.g. sitting or lounging

Inspecting a novel object

Cleaning themselves

Being cleaned by another individual

Fighting without weapons

Preparing to fight with a weapon

Showing casual affection displayed with any kind of loved one; family, friend, partner, etc.

Showing intense affection reserved for a specific kind of loved one

Yawning/stretching mouthparts to their full extent

Gripping a branch or high surface, trying not to fall off

Tripping or slipping on a wet surface

Actively balancing e.g. crossing a tightrope

Suddenly noticing something near them and getting spooked

Engaged in conversation

Treating an injury

For meat eaters: in the middle of a hunt For others: foraging and collecting food

Preparing food for a meal

Tending to a crop

Using a tool

Shaking or brushing something off their body

In a state they don’t usually live in e.g. aquatic being on land, terrestrial being in water

Putting on clothing or accessories

Getting a body modification e.g. tattoo, piercings

Using fine motor control to craft something

Trying to block out unpleasant stimuli e.g. covering ears, closing off nostrils

Reacting to an unpleasant stimulus

Loading cargo for transport

Working on building construction

Riding a vehicle or pack creature

Squeezing into a small space

The power of stealing a name.

“Jerboa”

The quaint rodent, the unique and lovable creature. Famous for its amusing and impressive skill at leaping and bouncing. An iconic species of the deserts of North Africa.

The first French nuclear bomb in the Sahara: Named after the jerboa.

France, in its imperial occupation of North and West Africa, used colonial Algeria’s Saharan landscape as the site of its first tests. The very first nuclear bomb unleashed by France, detonated on 13 February 1960, was Gerboise Bleue. The day before the bomb was detonated, French troops visited Algerians living in the test region, giving local residents chain necklaces to be worn. France detonated the bomb. Then French troops went back to collect the necklaces, which were actually measuring devices, meant to detect effects of the bomb. The French troops collected the data. But they didn’t tell the Algerian locals that they had just been poisoned, some of them fatally. They didn’t warn Algerians about the long-term effects of fallout, or what radiation would do to them, as residual poisoning continued to kill for decades. For many years, local people would harvest abandoned metals from testing sites, to refashion into jewelry, shelter, and other items. The French government knew that the remnants were toxic, but still failed to warn residents. After hundreds of thousands died in over 7 years of war, Algeria gained independence from France in 1962. Even afterwards, France detonated another 13 bombs in Algeria. The French government would not pass legislation providing compensation for victims of its nuclear bomb testing until 2010.

“Aldebaran”

The conspicuous orange-hued star Aldebaran. The seasonal arrival of this star, visible in the sky, has auspicious meaning. Especially in Polynesia where the stars, constellations, are sometimes referred to as “the roof of voyaging.” Stars guide oceanic navigation, and also guide food cultivation and harvest. For centuries and for many cultures across many islands across these seas, when the star became visible, would reemerge after an absence, the heliacal rising of Aldebaran in the skies of the tropical South Pacific signaled the beginning of the growing season for breadfruit, a quintessential resource across the Pacific and an iconic staple food. Breadfruit, of pivotal importance to food, sustenance. Aldebaran arrives, food can be cultivated.

Aldebaran brings life.

The first French nuclear bomb in Polynesia: Named Aldebaran.

After Algeria formally gained independence, France brought their weapons to imperial “possessions” in the South Pacific, to so-called “French Polynesia.” In May 1963, about 300 French personnel arrived at Moruroa, where 50,000 cubic meters of coral reef were obliterated to build access channels for the scientific/military infrastructure at what was designed as a testing/study site. Eventually, in the 1960s, over 10,000 French personnel and settlers (including civilian entrepreneurs and real estate developers) arrived in French Polynesia. The first bomb, detonated on 2 July 1966, was Aldebaran. French personnel recorded the environmental effects of radiation poisoning and fallout, but despite the immediate and extreme danger to Indigenous Polynesians, the French government did not declassify the results of those environmental studies until nearly 2010. By 1996, France had test 193 nuclear bombs in Polynesia. No victim officially compensated until after 2010. After the detonation of the bomb Aldebaran, over 400 kilometers away, drinking water at the notable island Mangareva contained 6 times the average amount of radiation; soil contained 50 times more radiation; unwashed garden vegetables contained 666 times more radiation; and, 3 months later, the rain falling on Mangareva contained 11 million times more radiation than the expected amount.

Thunderstorms, carrying poison. People hundreds of kilometers away had to hide from the rain.

Aldebaran brings death.

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The scale of the insult. To appropriate names, important to a culture, to a place, and then to ascribe those same names to the weapons that would then literally rain death upon those same people and landscapes.

found this old set of dorothy in a catsuit saving a kidnapped roger 🤭

he is trying very hard not to look lol

I read that entire intercept article and that is something for the history books bc I went in there possibly expecting to come away with at least one source corroborating a rape or rapes but nothing more. Instead, there was no secondary sources no forensic evidence that was used to corroborate any of the "witness testimony" instead the use of the word "screams" in the title of the infamous NYT article itself is from a guy who claims to have seen multiple rapes but backtracked to one rape and then backtracked again and said he only heard but was looking away.

I think palestinian journalists like Ali Abunimah and palestinians, in general, were treated with such vehemence for picking apart these articles. I remember when they first came out, there were literal quotes premising the onslaught of "first hand accounts" that "no forensic evidence has been provided" when journalists asked the Israeli first responders for the evidence. And for pointing that out, we were called unfathomably cruel and naive for believing rape didn't occur when that was not our main critique. The "story" was the alleged claim that Hamas militants used rape as a weapon of war which there is no evidence for. Their objective was to retrieve hostages to go into army bases and retrieve weapons. There is no evidence of an "order" to use rape as a tool of terror. We had an israeli woman say in an interview that when hamas militants entered her home they said something like "we are Muslims we won't hurt you" in English and then asked for a banana and left. These are rehearsed statements that offer more evidence that there was no such instruction to "allow" rape to be use in fact, the opposite.

And it truly is amazing to me that Palestinian sources are treated with such skepticism. And palestinian journalists are not "real journalists" because of their inexperience as if being on the ground experiencing the genocide in real time is not evidence enough, but a real journalist treated a story that requires a serious and impartial investigation like she was manifesting the evidence to come to her and demanding therapists whose relationships with patients require confidentiality to give her "proof" that rapes occurred in mass amounts

Why are agriculture classes the first time I've learned extremely basic info about nutrition and how digestion works. Why isn't this stuff in health textbooks or any easily accessible resource about healthy eating.

It should be illegal or something to sing “This Land Is Your Land” without the secret verses

remember when millennials said we weren't going to be as weird and stupid about gen z as boomers were about us? lol that didn't last long huh