[gerbthenerd]

Reblog if you’re part of a hostile nation that’s declared war on Australia

[mycroftrh]

Oh my god though guys you don’t know the best thing!  The best thing is: he’s right.

The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands is a micronation near Australia.  This is their flag:

The Gay Kingdom (as it is colloquially known) was founded in 2004 in protest against Australia’s legal stance against same-sex marriage.

Here are some of their stamps:

They are currently ruled by Emperor Dale I, and their currency is the Pink Dollar.

And, indeed - they declared war on Australia for not recognizing same-sex marriages performed outside the country.  (Second link.)

[sailurmars]

You’re telling me there has been a Gay Island this ENTIRE TIME and I’m only just finding out about it????

[feitanswife]

WHAT

[gondorsfinest]

okay, but not enough people know the details on this. people at pride were upset about gay rights in australia. so they decided to sail 200 miles into the coral sea just ‘cause and put a rainbow flag on a fucking empty island out of spite. and i’m talking empty. no inhabitants. zero. it was a flat piece of land with a bit of dry grass. now it has a camp site and a post office. 

they have a declaration of independence that talks a bit about gay rights and then just flat out copies the “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness” part from the american declaration of independence. and here’s the best part: the founding group actually elected their emperor. he was originally going to be called the “administrator” of a republic. their website, however, says that “upon legal advice, his title was changed to that of Sovereign on the grounds that under Australian law a defacto prince trying to claim his crown cannot be charged with treason”. so they made it a kingdom and he now claims to be a descendent of edward ii.

everything about this is glorious and everyone should know about it.

Keep reading

[ileolai]

Not one of you mentioned that the anthem for this nation is I Am What I Am by Gloria Gaynor. Not. One. Of. You.

[darkpuffin]

A very good micronation. Very good.

[tddkart]

Isabelle has a message for her enemies.

[thoodleoo]

idea for a classics podcast: get a bunch of people together who learned greek mythology at some point in their life and kind of remember it but have mostly forgotten it, and then try to get them to recount stories from greek mythology with only their vague recollection to guide them. as they attempt to piece together the story, they’ll likely end up with something that sort of resembles the original myth but with a bunch of weird differences, thereby creating new traditions in the vein of the greek bards of old

i’ll call it “homer? i hardly know her!”

[softypyro]

[harmlesslyobsessed]

[donutlikeu]

michael jordan sets us straight 

[seatrench]

Discus and Fry

(source)

[seatrench]

(source)

Anonymous asked:

i just gotta rant so like liSTEN im a nursing major and i only needed like 3 more classes for a bio minor so watevr but like obv im knowledgeable in like human bio but i needed this “survey plant kingdom” class for it so like i just finished this botany class but its fuCKING ME UP like i dont recognize my own thoughts half the time is that normal????

botanyshitposts answered:

i get a lot of asks like this and there’s something the botany community refers to as ‘plant blindness’ where before u start learning about plants u just grow up not really thinking about them and letting them fade into the background and stuff and then when you start learning about them you start losing the blindness and being like ‘wait whomst the fuck’ because all the preconceived notions and assumptions about plants that u didnt even know you had start being systematically broken and proved wrong and its very overwhelming and deadass changes how u see ur environment. like being Fucked Up after learning about plants is totally a phenomenon

[ritterum]

examples! fuck me up!

[botanyshitposts]

what got me Fucked Up for the first time was an internship at a local greenhouse where i learned that the retail plant industry is some Jurassic Park Ass Bull Shit. the science involved in making a pretty plant for sale is fucking incredible, and the fact that it’s a living thing makes the marketing kind of eerie.

-a lot of companies are based in california, where they have huge ass industrial greenhouses that grow shit en masse. these facilities are HUGE. plants are sold to retail greenhouses in one of two ways: 1. seed, sometimes coated in wax so electric planting machines can pick them up, or  2. ‘plugs’, where it’s a sheet of pre-planted dirt cubes that sprout into the plants. these are sold to retailers through local salespeople, conventions where u can go see all the Hot New Plants For This Season (seriously), or through giant spiral show books that get sent out to retailers. 

-one of my fave memories from that internship was my mentor taking me into the lower greenhouse and being like ‘want to see what $1,000 worth of seeds looks like?’ and i was like ‘yea’ and he took out a tupperware container with test tubes covered in codes and shit and i was Shook and he popped one open and knocked out one single wax-coated seed and was like ‘this seed can grow a pot of three different kinds of lettuce’ (because it’s three seeds pressed together with wax) and anyway i was fucked up

-those pretty hanging flower arrangements? some of them are pre-planned by the company. like, they have a maps for the pot that shows where to put in the shit and how much shit to put in. here’s an example from Proven Winners, one of the biggest greenhouse corporate giants out there (note the ‘coming to garden centers next year!’ thing. there are trends in this industry, shit gets specially made and rolled out and discontinued just like any other product, but the products are alive): 

-some of the products are popular and have been around for years. some are unpopular and dont sell well and get discontinued. retailers will have a good handle on what their consumer base wants and will reorder things that sell well. idk why this didnt occur to me before but yeah

-trees and woody plants? if youve ever bought one from a garden center you’ll know that that shit is expensive and goes up in price the bigger/older the plant is, and that’s true both on the consumer end and the retailer end. companies will often take some plants and overwinter them to get them bigger and older, then sell them for a higher profit. i was once told by my mentor that a few companies have caves that they bought out and converted for the very purpose of overwintering woody plants for sale and i think about that a lot. also when you order trees and woody plants, they get shipped out in semis and its a Whole Ass Ordeal. 

-in 2017 30+ varieties of orange petunia were recalled by the USDA APHIS for breaking laws on GMOs (although petunias aren’t really a ‘high-risk’ plant even in the terms of GMOs (they arent being eaten or anything), the companies had added genes and were selling the plants without going through the proper government certifications and channels. GMO plants need through assessment and testing before they can be sold in many countries, including europe and the US). you can read the REALLY fucking wild government order here (pdf), which includes such varieties as ‘BigDeal Freaky Fuchsia’, ‘Crazytunia Cherry Cheesecake’, and ‘KaBloom!’ among others. all retailers were allowed to keep and sell what they’d purchased, but all seed and plant matter being produced for sale en masse in those big greenhouses i was talking about earlier were ordered to be disposed of in a variety of interesting ways. ‘double-bagged incineration’ is probably my fave listed here

-plants are released in like…collections. as in like ‘over here we have the proven winners spark 2019 collection with our patented supertunias! heres a sneak peek’. i mentioned earlier here that plants are showcased to retailers in giant spiral books; when i was at the greenhouse, i asked if i could keep some. theyre absolutely fascinating in a way i cant really describe, like…I Do Not Know How To Describe How Weirdly Jurassic Parky This Feels So Here Are Some Pages

anyway so that was my first plant experience that fucked me up

[thedandycrickette]

I work at a garden retailer and I Can Confirm. Our buyers have to tour our company’s growing grounds occasionally to learn about the growing and shipping conditions and it is wild. I have pictures of tables full of little fuschia plugs and green houses full of experimental houseplants.

We’re actually getting ready to attend the company’s annual convention where we meat our vendor reps and learn about this year’s Hot New Plants. Last year my fave was a line of dwarf tomato bushes sold in a presentable pot and outfitted with a tomato cage so you just buy one and set it on your patio and its good to go. The industry really is wild.

[botanyshitposts]

“experimental houseplants” how do i get ur job

[botanyshitposts]

the average human stomach holds about a liter of fluid while empty, but can expand to up to 4 liters

meanwhile, Nepenthes attenboroughii, the world’s largest currently known species of carnivorous pitcher plant, can produce up to 1-1.5 liters of bug-digesting fluid with a trap large enough to hold it, with the largest ones expected to hold up to 2 liters

just to give a comparison as to how fucking massive it is 

[botanyshitposts]

i was not expecting the large amount of people wanting to drink the forbidden big plant juice and for tungle.net comedic value i feel inclined to say ‘no u cannot drink the forbidden big plant juice!!!’ but then my own curiosity drives me to think……could you drink the forbidden big plant juice? so here are my thots.

on the case of not being able to drink the forbidden big plant juice: 

-big plant juice is filled with half-digested bugs and occasionally unfortunate half-digested small birds and rodents (animal death tw under link), and that would be kinda gross 

-big plant juice is a light acid. it isn’t as volatile as human stomach acid and i wouldn’t equate it to like, drinking bleach or anything, but it is an acid at a low concentration meant to eat those dank bugs at a nice, low digestive simmer over the course of a few weeks. so like. that might burn a little i would imagine

-big plant juice may also have bacteria inside it helping to break down the food along with the plant’s own digestive enzymes and that might not be a good time in a human stomach

on the case of being able to drink the forbidden big plant juice: 

-in some parts of asia pitcher plants are referred to as ‘monkey cups’ because monkeys will occasionally sit and drink out of them. we are monkeys. therefore, the forbidden big plant juice might not be too bad

-in some parts of southeast asia where pitcher plants are common, the pitchers are cut off, emptied out, packed with rice and spices and roasted. this is like. a street food u can buy and just a thing that happens. behold: 

(i posted the recipe recorded as being used here). obviously this is different from straight up drinking the juice itself but its worth noting that things are regularly cooked in the forbidden plant. 

in conclusion: i think the viability of being able to drink the forbidden big plant juice would depend on how diluted the juice is. it would be safest to drink the big plant juice right after it rains, when the pitcher is full and the plant is still working on getting the amount of digestive enzymes adjusted to the amount of water. the forbidden plant juice is most forbidden, i would imagine, after a long drought when the juice in the pitcher is least watered down and most acidic. 

Anonymous asked:

hey if you dropped a soybean into a pitcher plant. herbivorous plants? cannibal plants?

botanyshitposts answered:

this is Nepenthes ampullaria, and they actually do this! they sit on the forest floor and eat leaf litter that falls into their pitchers, making them technically detritivores from our petty human meat-eating point of view. 

the face of cannibalism

[zooophagous]

These are SO CUTE

[bogleech]

Yeah it’s wild I mean technically plants already “feed on detritus” I guess, but they wait for those nutrients to integrate with the soil. This plant evolved to catch insects for extra nutrients, then stumbled onto the fact that it could just catch EVEN FRESHER DIRT instead.

I’ve heard anecdotes that staghorn ferns in the wild might do something similar but I can’t find much about that??

[aramis-dagaz]

Pre-dirt dirt!

[botanyshitposts]

i didn’t even consider this…..pre-dirt dirt……what do i do with this information…..

[missmartian23]

I have Staghorns and yes they do catch leaf litter and other such plant matter to feed of that to grow! They reproduce through spores and when those spores land, in, day, a nook or a cranny with enough decomposed material and there ya go!

I’m sorry I get super excited with Staghorns 🙃

[botanyshitposts]

to grow the forbidden stag one must first arrange an altar of corpses

Anonymous asked:

What's your favorite wildflower? -🌼

botanyshitposts answered:

eastern skunk cabbages (Symplocarpus foetidus)! ive talked about them extensively before on here so i won’t again, but they were my first Intense Plant Research Love and like all specific plant species i’ve spent large amounts of time delving into they hold a very special place in my heart. first of all, they are wildflowers, and i adore that they’re not traditional wildflowers; they’re stinky muddy disgusting lads who love having their enormous root systems submerged in cold running water at all times, usually in cold creeks and streams in north america. theyre also botanically fascinating for their production of heat during flowering, a phenomenon known as thermogenesis! 

theyre also the plants i get asked about most on this blog. i probably get a couple ‘what plant is this?!?!?!?’ skunk cabbage pic submissions every few months because the strange muddy lads tend to catch people off guard. this is what they look like in bloom (they start green before they bloom and then turn red/purple): 

they look way more unassuming when the flowers die off and they spend the spring and summer sitting in the mud photosynthesizing, living their lives:

iowa is at the southern end of their range, but there’s one (1) population in a protected habitat here just chilling in a spontaneous bog in the middle of a ton of farmland! it’s left over from the ice age, and from what i’ve seen there’s a good 400 individuals living their stinky lives down there. i used to visit periodically in high school lmao

[disgustingplants]

@botanyshitposts ……you….you too, are from Iowa? What a funny twist that two plant-shit-posting bloggers would be spawned from the same state.

<twilight zone music plays softly in the distance>

[skinnyorganicchemist]

[monkeysaysficus]

Reblog to support jar-opening lesbians

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

This is the Sue Perkins of Jar Opening Lesbians

Reblog for success in opening jars on the first try for the rest of the year!

[red-admiral-cupcakes]

And may this gift follow you into the new year

[william-snekspeare]

the second panel was originally going to have words but I decided it was better without them

[intj-confessions]

See, JK? Sometimes less is more.

[william-snekspeare]

hi this is so FUCKING funny

[feministism]

[troubleincorporated]

if you say the phrase “you can’t be mad at me i have the right to free speech” three times in a mirror justin mcelroy appears and vaporizes you instantly

[houghmuffin]

I think the context is important here

The tweets above were in reference to the backlash he got for these: