Tom Holland Does Rihanna’s “Umbrella” On Lip Sync Battle

kirby has eaten trees meta

Anon Hate IS Illegal.

Guys, I’m not kidding.

Suicide-baiting, cyberharassmemt, cyberstalking, death/rape threats, and hate speech are illegal in all 50 states as well as Australia and the UK.

Some places include school suspension or expels. Some even include jail time for multiple years.

And yes, they can find someone by username or IP alone.

Also, yes. There are methods of catching someone’s IP. Even under a VPN.

Forbes

How To Bait and Catch The Anonymous Person Harassing You On The Internet

Leo Traynor, an Internet user in Ireland, had a problem. More specifically, he had a troll, a very nasty troll.

So.

Next time you get hit with anon hate?

Casually remind them you can very easily take this to the next level. And they can earn jail time while you lay back in your chair, having saved yourself and everyone else from a violent criminal.

Your online actions have real life consequences.

Make sure they learn that.

(Just in case there’s a “the police wouldn’t do that” - Yes. They absolutely would.

AP NEWS

Pre-teens arrested for cyberbullying before girl's suicide

Two 12-year-olds in Florida were arrested for cyberbullying in connection with the death of a middle-school student who police say hanged he

Matters India

Man arrested for cyber bullying Kerala student

The Kerala police on July 28 took into custody the man alleged to have been the key tormentor of Hanan Hamid, the 19-year-old Kerala student

WNCT

Onslow County man accused of cyberbullying

An Onslow County man was arrested Monday after officials conducted an investigation into a cyberbullying case.

Or a “I can handle it.” No. That person will continue to harass others as well. And one of them may not be as strong as you. So do it for them and everyone else.

Or a “It’s not that severe.” Yes. It is. People have died because of this. It really is that severe.)

Take action. And make sure the lives of these bullies are truly wrecked.

only the true king could remove the sword from the stone…. no one else could…… they didn’t have…. arthurization

Today I learned

I don’t know what I was expecting.. but it was NOT this

This birb! *sniff*

Comic N-009: “CHERISH THIS BIRD”

As much as I like those other guys we gotta pay tribute to the objectively best characters.

how to format your story, a crash course

because my writing major soul dies a little bit more every time i see a perfectly good story improperly formatted.

this is a guide specifically for ao3 posting

1. Put A Double Return (Enter) Between Each Paragraph Instead Of An Indentation

fanfic is not academic writing. you don't need an indent at the beginning of each line. for the sake of scrolling it just makes it more organized and easier to read. The double return puts a space between the two paragraphs as seen here:

2. Make A New Paragraph Every Time The Camera Moves Or A New Thought Is Addressed

what the hell does that mean, youre probably asking. allow me to show you.

these are each three separate thoughts. so they each get their own paragraph. think about it like the reader is taking a pause between each thought, where should those pauses go?

3. Put A New Paragraph Every Time A New Person Speaks

do not and i repeat DO NOT write your dialogue like this:

"blah blah blah" he said. "blah blah blah" she said. "blah blah blah" they said. "blah blah blah" he said. "blah blah blah" she said.

it is impossible to read and its confusing and people will click off your story. dialogue should look like this:

see how each time a different person talks there's a new line? there can be not dialogue mixed with the dialogue, but every time the person speaking changes, there would be a new line.

Japanese legend: you have the face of who you loved most in a past life

It starts like this:

Cody stops dead in the middle of the hall, passkey tumbling from his fingers to clatter on the deck. Everything is grey and white and grim, and his armor is white white white without any markings at all. There’s an ache in his brain, a tremble in his hands, and not even the mercy of momentary amnesia to blunt the realization of what he’s done.

He remembers, vivid, vicious, the way it felt to take aim at Obi-Wan, the way he pulled the trigger. Remembers the fall, the look of surprise, the satisfaction. Remembers, too clear, what happened on the planet below just this morning, and the Rebel cell they put down, leaving no survivors.

There were children down there, he thinks, and feels sick to his stomach when before he’d only felt vague distaste.

Cody doesn’t know what happened. Doesn’t understand. There was the Emperor’s voice, the order—execute traitorous commanding officers, reliant on Palpatine’s verbal command alone—but…he doesn’t know how that became kill the Jedi, all the Jedi.

The 501st marched on the Temple. The 501stmurdered every child in the crèche.

Cody staggers, knees giving way. He stumbles into the wall, grabbing desperately for something to hold him on his feet, but there’s nothing. His stomach turns, and bile bubbles in the back of his throat as his vision wavers towards darkness.

Hells, but what have they done?

Instinct more than willpower pushes him back to his feet, gets him standing even as the world lurches. Cody thinks of his men, of the rest of the 212th, and has to swallow hard. He took casualty counts after they stormed the Rebel base. He saw the list of numbers marking the men who died, and all he felt was satisfaction at an operation successfully executed. No care for those under his command, his brothers. No thought for the lives cut short as anything other than statistics. And—it was him, it was him and Cody knows that, but what the hell was he even thinking? What was he doing? How could any part of him take that, accept that, and not even bother to spare a moment to grieve?

Cody’s breath hitches hard in his chest, not a sob but a close cousin, all tangled up with horror and remorse. All he has is slow-burn anger, the hotter burn of tears behind his eyes, and he aches.

His general is dead. His general is dead because Cody killed him, and Cody has spent the last two years serving an empire that declared every Jedi a traitor and burned the Republic to the ground.

A sob breaks through the quiet of the night-shift ship, loud and ragged and desperate, but it’s not from Cody’s throat. His head snaps up, and in an instant he’s moving, practically running down the corridor and around the next bend of the hall. There’s a figure in featureless armor slumped in the middle of the walkway, and Cody has one horrifying second where he can’t tell who it is. He looks and he doesn’t know, because the blank white armor is nothing but plastoid,

not even a hint of paint to set it apart from every other trooper on the ship. Hands are scrabbling at the helmet, hauling it off, but even that doesn’t help. Regulation haircut, no tattoos—they’re not allowed them, aren’t allowed any marks of individuality. Or maybe they just don’t want them, and that’s a thousand times more chilling to consider.

But—

But.

That gasping breath, that hitched sob. Cody remembers, because he’s the one who had to deliver the news of Waxer’s death in friendly fire. He’s the one who sat up for night after night, letting his brother cry into his shoulder, shaking, broken.

“Boil,” he says, and Boil chokes, shakes.

“We—we killed them,” he says, ragged, ruined, and Cody closes his eyes, reaches out. Hauls Boil in, clutching him close like he did after Waxer’s death, and tries not to think about how Boil’s face is just like every other clone’s, indistinct and unremarkable. How, ten minutes before, Cody would have thought of him by his CT number and seen nothing wrong with it, and Boil would have answered without so much as a second thought.

Cody doesn’t who which them Boil means. There have been far too many bodies left behind these last two years, too many victims. Too many Jedi, and Cody wants to shake, wants to curl up with Boil somewhere dark and hunker down until this all fades away, until they wake up, until it’s all a dream and it’s not real.

“Yeah, vod,” he says, and the name is unfamiliar on his tongue after two years without speaking it, clumsy and rough and half-forgotten. No brothers, in the Empire. Just soldiers. “We did.”

“It was us,” Boil whispers. “It was us but it wasn’t.”

There was something. Something that changed them. Not a lot. Not enough to take away memories or thoughts or training. But—they faded, after Order 66. They conformed. They let their generals and admirals do the thinking, took orders, followed them. there was nothing left of the individuals behind the identical faces, and no trace of the desire to find them.

Maybe that’s the most insidious thing of all. Whatever controlled them, it stripped away all thought of wanting to be people and not just weapons to be aimed and fired.

“Kriff,” Cody breathes, and digs his fingers into Boil’s hair. Sits back on his knees, lightheaded, and realizes that he’s shaking. He’s trembling, so hard he couldn’t aim a blaster even if he was pressing it against the side of his own head. And—maybe that’s a more tempting thought than it’s ever been. Maybe he would try, if he didn’t have Boil in his arms, coming apart.

Boil’s gauntlets scrape the plastoid of Cody’s armor, dig in. The sound that shatters out of is throat is almost a laugh, and he buries his face in Cody’s throat.

“Never heard you swear before, sir,” he manages.

Cody chokes on a breath, breathes out something that might be a chuckle in a kinder universe. “I was saving it,” he says, “for a time when it felt right.”

No need to say that that time is now. It’s obvious. So clearly, achingly obvious.

Boil’s words break into a sob before he can even get them out, and he digs his fingers into Cody’s armor like he’s going to try and claw his way through. “Waxer,” he breathes. “Waxer would shoot me himself, with what we did. He’d have executed me.”

Cody wants to argue, wants to protest. Waxer was kind. He was the kindest soul Cody ever met. But—

He thinks of Waxer, and then he thinks of Rex. Rex, lost during the Siege of Mandalore, dead and burned and gone, but if he could see Cody now—

Cody wouldn’t even deserve the mercy of a quick death, but Rex would probably give it to him anyway. And Cody wouldn’t even try to protest, knowing—everything.

It wasn’t them, but it was.

Cody doesn’t know what changed them, has even less of an idea what changed them back. But there was a change, there was something, and he knows it, feels it, sees it.

They’ve got their names back, and even if it’s much too little and far too late, they’re going to have to make the most of it.

.

(Or maybe it starts like this:

There’s a storm outside lashing the windows, but there’s always a storm on Kamino. There’s blood on the floor of the lab, a body, but Te Tinu can’t feel regret, can’t feel remorse. Not for this, not ever.

Her hand is steady on the blaster, unwavering as she presses it to the center of Nala Se’s chest. One hand on the weapon, her other on the computer, and she’s been studying for half a decade now to know how to do precisely this. The command is multilayered, delicate, precise, but Te Tinu is a scientist just as much as she’s a Rebel.

The Empire hasn’t reached its claws into Kamino yet. Nothing much has changed. But Te Tinu has seen the outside world, has watched the clones she grew from genetic material be born and raised and ruined, every shred of personhood stripped away.

Te Tinu is a scientist just as much as she’s a Rebel. They were creating souls in this lab, and Nala Se stripped all of that away with one organic chip, all for the sake of credits.

“You won’t be allowed to do this,” Nala Se says, coldly furious, but she keeps her hands raised, her body still. Her eyes are arctic, but Te Tinu meets them defiance, with hatred, with the resentment that she’s kept buried all these many, many years.

There are guards coming. That’s fine. Te Tinu never planned to leave this laboratory alive.

“You made your army, Nala Se,” she hisses. “You made your army and then you destroyed them. You stripped them of value, of meaning, for credits. You are the one who should have been stopped long ago.”

The computer chimes, the program loaded. Te Tinu smiles, even as Nala Se’s eyes widen.

“Look,” she says, and shifts just enough that Nala Se can see the holograms. The systems, the code she’s added, the command. “Look at this, Nala Se. Look at victory.”

“This isn’t victory, this is madness,” Nala Se tells her, but Te Tinu just smiles.

“It is a victory for science,” she corrects, and tips her head. “A victory for the Rebellion, too.”

Nala Se’s nostrils flare. “You will be slaughtered before you can take one step from this lab,” she says. “And I will undo every last piece of your shoddy work, Te Tinu.”

“Ah,” Te Tinu says, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her before the threat. “That would be most inconvenient, wouldn’t it? I spent so long on this, after all.”

Nala Se registers what she’s about to do half an instant before Te Tinu pulls the trigger. She always was the smartest person in any given room.

Coldly, Te Tinu watches her body collapse, long limbs tangling, bright blue blood seeping out across the tile. Deftly, she holsters the blaster, checks that the other scientist is equally dead, and turns back to the computer. There’s a thump against the door, a raised voice, but Te Tinu ignores it, focusing on her program. The biochips implanted in the clone armies are as flawless as any other aspect of Kaminoan design, for all that they’re meant for a fundamentally flawed purpose, so they’re almost impossible to disrupt. Te Tinu doesn’t need to disrupt them, though, just…change their current function.

The pre-encoded orders can’t be stripped away, replaced by new ones. It would be like reprogramming the chips from the ground up, but they’re already active, already working. A soft reboot is what’s needed, and Te Tinu’s program will do just that.

There’s no more Chancellor to pass out orders. He’s the emperor now, and the coding in the chips is quite specific. Without the direct title of Supreme Chancellor, Palpatine’s commands will mean as little as anyone else’s.

A weakness, though Nala Se never would have termed it so.

The door of the lab shudders, creaks. Te Tinu doesn’t look back, types in the last set of commands and activates them.

There’s a long, long moment as the blood pools and the door groans and someone speaks loudly, quickly, fiercely, so very unlike a Kaminoan.

Then, soft, the computer beeps.

The chips reset.

Te Tinu smiles, even as the door gives way. She turns to face the Defense Force, one hand going for her blaster, the other hitting the button that will trigger a wipe of every computer in the lab and leave them unable to reverse her work.

“For science,” she says, and raises the blaster, taking a graceful step forward. “For liberty.”

The Defense Force fires, but they’re already far too late.

Te Tinu dies with a smile on her face, bright blood on the floor of the lab, and regrets nothing but the time it took to make it here.

She’s won.)

.

Or maybe, maybe, it starts like this:

Cody looks around the room, at the figures there, at the familiar faces. At the same face, repeated, and some have scars to set them apart, some have old tattoos, but most don’t. Most of them have lost their markers, their names. Most of them have been turned into nothing but puppets for a greater cause. Puppets for a cause they once gave their lives to stop.

Cody looks around the room, at the remnants of Ghost and Torrent and the Wolfpack, at trooper after trooper who woke up this morning with the desperate, horrified realization of what they became. Of what they did, and how their hands were forced, and how they killed their generals, killed civilians, killed for an empire that destroyed them.

His hands are still shaking. They haven’t stopped since he remembered himself.

Cody wishes, dearly, just for a moment, that he had Rex at his back again, or Wolffe. But they’re both dead, and probably better off for it. He can’t imagine what Rex’s reaction would have been to the massacre at the Temple. To the fact that the 501st was used to do it.

Jesse is sitting in the corner, side by side with Boil and Wooley. They’re tangled together, grieving together, and it’s only seeing them like that that makes Cody realize how long it’s been since he saw any brothers touching. Not something deemed essential to performance, and so it was quietly shunted away.

Cody breathes, and breathes, and still his hands won’t stop shaking.

It’s Neyo, of all the troopers, who steps up beside him. He curls a hand around Cody’s shoulder, and—

Oh, Cody thinks, and has to swallow. It’s been a hell of a long time since anyone touched him, hasn’t it? Before Neyo, before Boil—he can’t even begin to remember.

“Breathe,” Neyo says, short, curt, but not unkind. “We all know we’re going to do something. The only question is what.”

Cody was a marshal commander, once, before the empire rose. Back when he could think clearly enough to be a commander, rather than just another follower. He knows strategy, and he knows tactics, and he knows how to prioritize what has to be done over what he wants to do. And yet—

He can’t make that decision here. Looking at the identical, unaltered faces, the unchanging grey uniforms, the plain white armor, all he can think is that he wants to burn the whole damned cruiser down around them and be done with it.

The break room is empty of anyone who isn’t a clone. The other officers don’t come here, don’t care. The clones make good obedient drones, who work well without supervision and don’t need a firm hand to maintain their fanatic belief in the Empire. Or at least, that’s how it was. That’s how it’s been for two years now.

Cody doesn’t care. In this, at least, it’s valuable, because it lets the clones gather without anyone thinking things are off.

He leans forward, elbows on the table, trembling hands clasped. Tries not to think too hard, tries not to dwell, but—

“It’s all of us, now?” he asks Neyo.

Neyo pauses, mouth tightening. Cody pretends not to see the way he presses his fingers tight against the numbers tattooed beneath his eye. “As far as I could tell,” he says roughly. “I contacted three other clone commanders on different cruisers, and they’re all…”

“Awake,” Cody supplies quietly, because that’s the only word for it. They were in a daze, these last two years. Dreaming, maybe, trapped in a nightmare. Now they’re all awake, but unlike with a dream, they have to deal with the fallout now.

Neyo grimaces, but doesn’t argue. “We don’t even know what happened,” he says, and there’s a thread of anger to it. “Or if we could go back.”

Back to sleepwalking, placid and loyal. Back to the haze of not caring, not being. Cody breathes out, and it shakes, but—

With rage, this time.

“We might not know how, but we know who,” he says tightly. “Only one person benefitted from us becoming…that.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” Sinker, at the next table over, asks roughly. His eyes are red, and Boost is nowhere to be seen.

The Wolfpack shot Plo Koon out of the air over Cato Neimoidia, fired on him from behind and brought his fighter down in a ball of flames. Until yesterday, every last one of them was proud of that fact.

Cody closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at Sinker’s face, his once-white hair grown in dark again, because individuality was another thing stripped from them alongside their free will. So that he doesn’t have to think about firing on Obi-Wan, and watching him fall, and feeling glad to have carried out an order.

They all murdered their generals. The only people in the galaxy who ever tried to fight for them, who ever treated them like people in their own right, and he and his brothers slaughtered them right down to the last youngling.

Cody’s going to be sick. But—later. When he can lock himself in his bunk and be weak, just for a little while.

Right now his brothers need him.

Forcing his eyes open, his breathing back under control, Cody looks up. He meets Neyo’s eyes, then Sinker’s, and smiles. It’s a rictus, death’s-head grin, full of teeth. “Glory to the emperor,” he says. “Long may he reign.”

SILENT NIGHT

you are a mouse.

and right now, you’re scuttling around the forest floor going about your mousey business. you have many adorable mouse children to feed, after all.

distantly, you hear a faint shriek like the sound of failing anti-lock breaks.

you pause for a moment, then resume your foraging. it was probably nothing! you are a mouse and lack creative prediction abilities. you are just thinking that maybe later you’ll engage in some traditional mouse activities and pee in a sleeping bag or two, when 

BAM

suddenly, you are now a mousey corpse being borne skyward at upwards of thirty miles per hour. you would probably marvel at this, if you weren’t just a mouse and now also dead. your sad little corpse will be swallowed whole and your children will be eaten by, I dunno, frogs or something. nature is a real bitch sometimes.

congrats, you’ve just made the brutal acquaintance of the Grim Reaper of the rodent world:

HOLY NIGHT, YIKES.

but enough dramatic bullshit! you aren’t a mouse anymore, you’re a person reading a very informative and interesting article about Barn Owls which was written by a very handsome and modest genius. ahem. anyway. compared to some of the birds I’ve featured in Weird Biology before, Barn Owls may seem pretty normal! at least on the surface. (spoiler alert: Barn Owls Are Not Normal. at all.)

Barn Owls are mediumish owls that look kind of like a toasty loaf of bread, if that loaf had a pair of pitch-black nightmare eyeballs revealing a door into eternal darkness. (IF YOU LOOK INTO A BARN OWL’S EYES, THE ABYSS DOES INDEED GAZE BACK.) they reach a little over a foot long, with a three-foot wingspan. and like all owls, Barn Owls are stupidly light, tipping the scales at a whole pound and a half at the absolute most. this might not seem that big, but if that pound and a half is strafing towards you at 60+ mph talons first, it puts a whole new perspective on the situation.

so where do Barn Owls live, anyway? well. a better question to ask would be, “where do Barn Owls NOT live, Jesus Christ.”

Antarctica. the answer is Antarctica.

Barn Owls are what we call a “cosmopolitan species”, meaning they live fucking everywhere. they can be found in farmlands, woodlands, and grasslands across EVERY MAJOR CONTINENT and MOST LARGE ISLANDS worldwide! (except Antarctica, for obvious reasons.) this, if you couldn’t tell, is completely fucking ridiculous. especially for a species of owl, which tend to be mediocre fliers and grouchy homebodies.

in fact, Barn Owls have the widest distribution of any non-seabird avian in the entire world! these stubby birds of prey may look like toasted mashmallows, but they’re tenacious fliers and extremely adaptable predators who can be active day or night and will eat anything up to and including a slice of cheese pizza. these fluffy bastards even turn up regularly in New Zealand, and god only knows how they even got over there. (there’s now a stable breeding population there, to the regret of the rats.)

maybe they just called an Uber.

but aside from their adaptable tenacity, Barn Owls are pretty standard as owls go. by which I mean they’re a shambling heap of bizarro traits barely even recognizable as a bird! where should we start? 

EYEBALLS. let’s start with eyeballs.

like all owls, Barn Owls have eyeballs that are modified for UNIMAGINABLE low-light vision. they don’t see color very well, but that’s a hell of a trade of for having basically a set of night-vision goggles for eyeballs! and to cap it all off, these lucky bastards see just fine in daylight, too.

but this amazing vision comes with a price.

it’s a really weird price, too. not like the standard “first-born child” bullshit or anything.

having excellent night and day vision is fairly rare in nature, and Barn Owls had to pull some biological strings to get it- their eyeballs are more of a modified tube than the traditional Orb. yes, that’s insane. and also yes, this means the Barn Owl can’t actually move its eyes to look around like you and I can. so what do they do instead? 

why, they’ve developed loose tendons and ligaments in their neck that allow them nearly 270 degrees of rotation, that’s what they did! a perfectly logical and sane response that give NO ONE the screaming meemies OR the heebie jeebies! for sure!

…yeah okay, that’s actually pretty adorable.

but these two biological hat tricks pale in comparison to the Barn Owls’ true source of strength, the reason for their hunting prowess! which is… the ability to hear real good. REAL GOOD. Barn Owls have hearing keen enough to pick up a mouse fart in a windstorm, but they can also peg the GPS location of that poor embarrassed mouse down to within a couple inches! impressive, right? this is because their ears are sideways.

kind of, anyway. Barn Owl ears are two holes under the feathers at the edge of their attractive facial disc, and one of them is a few centimeters higher than the other. like maybe god stuck a pencil into one of them and just yanked it off kilter, or something. but there’s a method to this madness- having off-centered ears gives the Barn Owl a true reckoning of where a sound is happening in 3d space by tracking which ear receives a sound first. they’re basically a biological sonar receiver.

but I’ve saved the last for least! let’s get into the ability that really puts the cherry on this creeptacular Barn Owl cake. 

all is calm! all is bright!

Barn Owls are utterly and completely silent fliers. (when they aren’t making noises like a demon caught in a paper shredder, anyway.) one could flap three inches in front of your face in a dark room and you would never know. this is because every feather on their wings and body is edged in soft fringes that absorb sound, basically turning Barn Owls into flying private screenings of The Quiet Place.

and this absolute silence gives them a MASSIVE edge in hunting! Barn Owls hunt by flying just above the ground at absolutely insane speeds and just kind of picking up whatever smaller creature tickles their dinnertime fancies. usually this dinner is small rodents and rabbits, but Barn Owls can and will eat anything they can get the drop on up to and including SLEEPING HAWKS. smaller owl dinners like mice get swallowed whole (aaaaaaa), and their bones and fur are regurgitated later (AAAAAAAAA).

a normal bird!

so with everything they have going for them, how are Barn Owls doing on the global stage in these difficult times? pretty fucking great, actually! Barn Owls are decreasing in some areas but increasing rapidly in others, and overall they’re ranked as Least Concern. this is likely because Barn Owls really don’t have a problem coexisting with humans!

Barn Owls love to hang out in human structures (like barns! wild, right? WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED.) and eat a lot of species that humans consider to be pests, like rats and mice. it’s a win-win for both owls and humans, and it definitely helps that Barn Owls are routinely misidentified as cryptids (*coughcoughmothmancough*) or the tortured souls of the damned! (it’s because they scream at night and kind of look like the accursed shades of the dead, doomed to forever walk the earth in torment.) here’s hoping that this silent avian predator sticks around for a long, long time to come.

SLEEP IN HEAVENLY PEACE.

–

thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series on my tumblr here, or check out the official archive at weirdbiology.com!

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IMAGE SOURCES

img1- Birds in Backyards img2- All About Birds img3- Birders Store img4- Mother Nature Network img5- Lisa L. Kee img6- Norfolk Wildlife Trust img7- Roy Rimmer img8- Steven Boyce