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The cave habitats of Tennessee and Kentucky have species that most will never see. Here are some of the unusual creatures found there.

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/196105

From BBC News via this RSS feed

Character is Kaho-chan from There’s No Freaking Way I’ll be Your Lover! Unless….

It's a spoiler to the image explain, but I'll give you a hint:

This year, I told myself, I was going to read for pleasure. I spent most of 2024 engaged in a research project, reading a lot of abstruse theory and depressing news stories about transphobia, and I could not cram any more facts about gender into my head without giving myself an aneurysm. I knew 2025 was going to be a terrible year, with a high toll of human death and suffering, and I wanted to carve out a place for joy, so that I could do my work without suffocating. I figured I would study up for my other gig —I sometimes write comics—and just read a whole lot of comic books. Simple, right?

Nothing in this world is simple. Nothing is free of politics, or of queerness, and comics have been political and queer since the beginning.

Most people’s first association with the term “comic books” is mainstream superhero comics, of the type put out by DC and Marvel, which are a notoriously escapist medium. Superheroes have never been apolitical—Superman, the world’s most powerful immigrant, was created by two Jewish immigrants in 1938 as a reaction to the rise of Nazism; the X-Men were created in the 1960s as an allegory for the civil rights movement—but they are, explicitly, power fantasies. They exist to tell stories about good overcoming evil, or (subtextually) marginalized people overcoming their oppressors. Unlike our world, they come with a built-in guarantee of justice, which is a large part of the appeal.

Yet those comics represent only a fraction of the work being made—and in queer comics, particularly, there is a long history of work that is autobiographical, realistic, organic, grounded and explicitly radical. In the 1980s and ’90s, underground comics like Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist or Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For were upfront and enraged about the realities of queer life at a time when mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch us. Rather than encoding the realities of queer oppression in an allegory, so as to sway straight hearts and minds, they spoke directly to and from the community. In the present-day culture war on trans people, independent and small-press comics like Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer or the web-based Haus of Decline still spark a large share of the conversation.

archive.is link

Tinder is leaning into dating apps’ reputation for superficiality with the launch of a new feature that lets paid subscribers add their height preferences to their profiles.

After a Reddit user posted a photo of the new height setting in the Tinder app, a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the discovery setting has been launched as a global test.

Tinder Gold and Premium subscribers in the test group will have access to the feature, but not free users, we’re told. In addition, the setting will indicate a preference, rather than functioning as a “hard filter,” the company says. That means it won’t actually block or exclude profiles but instead inform recommendations.

“We’re always listening to what matters most to our Tinder users — and testing the paid height preference is a great example of how we’re building with urgency, clarity, and focus,” said Phil Price Fry, VP Comms at Tinder, in an emailed statement. “This is part of a broader effort to help people connect more intentionally on Tinder. Our new product principles guide every decision, and this one speaks directly to a few: prioritizing user outcomes, moving fast, and learning quickly. Not every test becomes a permanent feature, but every test helps us learn how we can deliver smarter, more relevant experiences and push the category forward.”

Forests in the Peruvian Amazon aren't growing back after gold mining—not just because the soil is damaged by toxic metals, but because the land has been depleted of its water. A common mining method known as suction mining reshapes the terrain in ways that drain moisture and trap heat, creating harsh conditions where even replanted seedlings can't survive.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/39995444

Earlier this month the "Create New Issue" page on GitHub got a new option. "Save time by creating issues with Copilot" (next to a link labeled "Get started.") Though the option later disappeared, they'd seemed very committed to the feature. "With Copilot, creating issues...is now faster and easier," GitHub's blog announced May 19. (And "all without sacrificing quality.")

Basically is there a way to watch kick without ads that you know of?