Stabbed! A Short Comic

I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍

Had a woman bring in her ferret for an exam and when I went into the room a second ferret poked its head out of her bag. In delighted surprise I exclaimed “oh you have two!” and she immediately responded “yes, I’m a small business owner”

Have to admit it took me a second

Why the fuck are the elongated not-fox and the little bear-dog cousins????

Shoutout to the maned wolf, which is technically neither wolf nor fox but has its own genus called Chrysocyon! Why -

why are your legs so long?

I mean, intellectually, I understand that it’s because you live in grasslands and have evolved to be able to see over the grass, but emotionally… why? Are they?? Like that??? Surely there was a way to make your body more cohesive and proportional-looking?

banned from the clock app for making too many alarms. you set too many alarms girl! banned from clock app.

sorry but this is the funniest fucking thing to me

“The fascinating world of insects” by Free High-Quality Documentaries on youtube

Can we go ahead and stop teaching corvids how to use tools, it's getting spooky

Once again randomly remembered this story about a couple who had a small parrot - pretty sure it was a budgie - who didn't talk but learned to communicate with people in its own way. Once it figured out that people always turn to check their phones when the notification sound comes on, it started making the text message notification sound to request human attention. The parrot also liked to follow people to the door whenever guests were leaving, and would use its wings to pantomime the motions of a person putting their coat on. A very clever, charming bird.

And every once in a while it just randomly hated some people. Not for any real reason, or even reason to suspect bad vibes, but by deciding "fuck this person in particular" for shits and giggles alone. And one time when the owners had invited a new friend to their home, the bird decided that it Did Not Like Her.

So in the middle of polite conversation, the bird - who was free to roam around the apartment at the time - hopped onto the living room coffee table, right in front of the unwanted guest. And in that moment, the owners put two and two together and understood that whatever mischief the bird had decided to do, it was now too late to stop it.

But instead of unleashing the absolute hell that even the tiniest displeased parrot could be capable of, the little budgie made its little "may I have your attention please" cell phone notification sound, and once the guest was focused on the bird, looked at her dead in the eye while doing the putting-my-coat-on wing motion.

The guest did not recognise the pantomime for what it was, but she was nonetheless delighted that the parrot would do a little wing-roll dance for her. And the host couple were at first too stunned and then too polite to tell her how impressive that gesture truly was. Their bird had shown both remarkable restraint and cleverness by using its entire vocabulary of human communication just to say

"I have an important announcement: I think you should leave."

crinoids are so insane what's up with them

????? plant

??????? plant whos schmoovin