After dealing with a Halloween weekend hangover and some not-so-great midterm election results for many LGBT folks (don’t read about Iowa unless you want to be depressed for a year), I’ve been scouring the internet in search of a pick-me-up.
Imagine my delight when I came upon this Wired gallery featuring some of the choicest shots from Zooborns.com. If you’re not familiar (and I wasn’t until today), Zooborns is a website that features adorable baby animals. Geeks, don’t worry, there’s plenty of science tucked into the site’s drool-worthy pages, as the whole point of the enterprise is to educate folks about ecology and biology and encourage conservation efforts.
The blog was founded under some pretty dorky pretenses, too. Site founder Andrew Bleiman explains:
In 2005, I started a bizarre zoology news and humor site with my brother Ben called Zooillogix … pretty soon biologists around the world were sending along press releases, including a number of zoo researchers. Once I was on the zoo PR lists, the baby-animal announcements started piling up, but a snarky bizarre zoology blog wasn’t really the right place for them. However, I realized there should be a right place to share these pictures and associated conservation information, and voila, ZooBorns was, ahem, born!
Underwire is featuring the first Zooborns product — a print book featuring some of the best pictures of all time — along with plenty of never-before-seen shots. They’re saying it’s a great gift for kids, but I think it’s a perfect treat for nerds and animal lovers, too; not to mention lesbians! If you don’t find this picture of an ocelot kitten positively squee-worthy, you may need to give up your gay card. I’m just saying.
Escapism of an entirely different (and even geekier) sort can be found in this amazing little Star Wars spoof video. Seen on Io9, it’s a hilarious Lego animated short that gives a “retelling” of the original trilogy, starring none other than Jar Jar Binks. Don’t let that stop you — it’s cute and clever and genuinely funny.
