When I worked at McMurdo, Werner Herzog was there to film ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2007). He gave a private screening of Tod Browning's FREAKS (1932) and afterwards I got to tell him about a movie* with an all-dwarf cast that he had never heard of. *THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN (1938)

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

I know this is ancillary to the point but this literally happened like three times in the last few years: tourists following their GPS drove straight down the boat ramp and INTO Honokōhau harbor on the Big Island. In front of people watching and yelling at them!

I'm working on finally finishing something I started in 2015(!) and oh man I am in love with these old hand-drawn distribution maps. GIS could never. From a paper by the great (and recently departed) Bill Smith-Vaniz. #fishes

what the actual fuck are these dumb motherfuckers doing

Every legal story now is either Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach or In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport

How could I possibly identify Alan Moore as a…oh never mind got him

Here's a #Crustmas / #fishmas / #25DaysOfFishmas double-whammy: Two Cephalopholis igarashiensis groupers just partying in among an absolute MESS of little purple and yellow shrimps (what are they?!) Filmed from a crewed submersible at ~215m on expedition in Tuvalu. 🐠🦑🦀

Happy #AntarcticaDay! Here I am almost 20 years ago, rising above the McMurdo Sound sea ice with Mount Erebus steaming in the distance. I still think about Antarctica all the time. (working in Antarctica led, in a very roundabout way, to me studying Indo-Pacific reef fishes & biodiversity)

Introduce yourself with five shows you've seen multiple times Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (every west coast date since like 2001) Shellac (4x?) Songs: Ohia/Magnolia Electric Co (3x, RIP Jason Molina) Red Sparrowes (4x) Sleep (3x)

Happy birthday Wata! ✌️

A movie that takes place where you're from

Lilipuna Pier videos, part 4, bringing back #FlatFuckFriday (is that a thing still?): Here's a young hīhīmanu or spotted eagle ray (Aeotobatus ocellatus). They seem to like to forage on the shallow reef flat under the pier and I love seeing them. 🐠🦑

I hold the dubious honor of having done so on All Seven Continents. So I’m gonna cheat and say my exotic location is that collections as a whole.

Part 3 of Bad Videos Taken from the Lilipuna Pier: This smiley guy is Diodon hystrix, the kōkala or spotted porcupinefish. For some reason there's almost always a big aggregation of these guys in the deeper water off the end of the pier and I don't know why (though it's probably cleaning). 🐠🦑

Distorted Videos of Stuff I Saw Off The Lilipuna Pier, Part 2. Today, we got squid. These are muhe‘e or bigfin reef squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana). I don't see them often, so I consider it a treat that several were hanging around this morning. 🐠🦑

Part one of a potentially ongoing series entitled Distorted Videos of Stuff I Saw Off The Lilipuna Pier* Let's start with a common one (but a fun one). This is the ‘ō‘io orshortjaw bonefish, Albula glossodonta. For some reason, they're often bigger in Hawai‘i than elsewhere in the Pacific. 🐠🦑

A beautiful kelpfish (Gibbonsia metzi) from an after-dark negative tide near Santa Cruz, CA. Look at his little striped mittens! 🐟🐠🐟

after a lifetime of constituents being furious at them for doing nothing the democrats have decided to do something the one time everybody begged them to do nothing

Lots of hard, shitty lessons being learned from this presidency. And one of the many I hope you're learning is, white supremacy is incompatible with reality, and cannot exist without historical revisionism.

Good things are possible and we don’t have to settle.

I think a lot about the chance we had at the start of COVID to finally become a more compassionate, collectivist nation, and how profoundly we were failed not only by the sociopathic greed of the ruling class but by each other. It doesn’t mean we won’t get there, but the lost opportunity haunts me.

This is good advice

I have no choice but to believe you if you tell me you can't tell the difference between the totenkopf and the Jolly Roger but if that's the case you should absolutely not be allowed to drive a car

Stop scrolling and post two characters who bring you happiness (these are real people but also they are Characters)

New paper! We tested #eDNA primers for detecting #fishes in Hawai‘i. 12S (MiFish, Riaz) performed best w/r/t fish sequence proportion. However, our major conclusion is that mock communities can lead you astray, since they don't accurately predict how primers will perform in a natural environment.

I'm so sick of discourse from supposed allies about where trans people went wrong. Where we "went wrong" is that billionaires spent unimaginably large sums to attack us repeatedly and major media outlets have spent a decade piling on.

What's the best one liner in movie history?

"mooSOObee"

This sucks but it always struck me as stupid that it wasn't just a website to begin with. Like why the obsession/need to make it an ios app? Make it a website! You can still use your iphone! www.wired.com/story/apple-...

normal person: i just want a place to hang out with my friends tech weirdo: and shitheads np: no just my friends tw: but what about hearing alternative views on race and gender? np: we just want to hang out and goof around tw: so where do the shitheads fit in then np: no shitheads tw: not following

I have never seen a single episode of Seinfeld.

For my algae heads: happy spooky season! (📷: my friend Stephanie who isn’t on here) 🦑

Everything else sucks, but these things I got to do in 2025 have truly helped me keep my head above water: 1) Descend in a submersible and face a living nautilus. 2) See the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry in person*. h/t to @book-historia.bsky.social for alerting me that the TRH was on display

"what do you want them to do?"

Remember how scary it was for the 36 hours where it felt like the Right could explode into violence as a repercussion of an assassination? That's what our trans brothers & sisters feel like every fucking day We have to protect them at all costs. They are our line in the sand; not a bargaining chip.

- you clean up that banksy? - sure did, your honour, leaving a perfect, permanent outline, imbuing the work with real fuckin gravitas while making its point better than the artist did himself just like you asked

Alright, so I've been afraid to say this out loud, but I think after today, I can say it: In the first Battle of Los Angeles, the good people of LA County have prevailed. We beat ICE back. 1/

Hard agree for Rozz Williams, I was a very emotional teen when he died. The two other big ones for me were Jason Molina and Jhonn Balance. Both were towering talents and their deaths were deeply tragic and eminently preventable.

It’s wild how people never really think through that the two-state solution is basically in the same genre as the outcome if the South had been allowed to secede.

A bit of a death march, ~6 km in the full sun up 500 m or so* (and possibly some light trespassing), but 100% worth it for the stones. Villard Dolmen, Ubaye, France. @stoneclub.bsky.social @megalithic.bsky.social *google will say you can drive there but only if you have, like, a land rover.

“You used to be able to listen to Godspeed You! Black Emperor on streaming platforms, haha you can’t do that anymore! Things changed. They don’t play Godspeed anymore on the Spotify…”

Gotta be musubi: launched from a sling.

In Funafuti, Tuvalu, the airstrip is basically just a soccer field until 20 minutes before the plane lands. It's very chill.

behold: a woman

N: Longyearbyen, Svalbard E: Taveuni, Fiji S: Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station W: Also Taveuni, I guess (the 180º meridian goes through Taveuni so it's simultaneously furthest east AND west, depending on your perspective)

if you cannot win an election over 3 years away against the most loathsome people in the US while they are doing things like *kidnapping the fucking ice cream man off the street in broad daylight* without a ritual sacrifice of at-risk people, you are not the future of humanity. dream bigger, better.

As end-of-empire scenarios go it is so much more dignified to get your capital city sacked by the Visigoths than to have a bunch of illiterate rich people in their 70s doing it through a series of incomprehensible tantrums because their brains were defeated by their phones.