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when my daughter was a newborn my cat adopted her and whenever she'd cry my cat would start biting whoever was holding her if we didn't soothe her quickly enough 😭

Also hey, cultural history time: The reason why cats are associated with women wasn't ultimately and originally about women as sly, cruel, or capricious creatures, but about cats as mothers to their kittens. And yes, sure, reducing womanhood to motherhood and a woman's worth to her fertility is Much Bad, but nonetheless I want to stress that the reason cats became the symbol animal of so many goddesses and were associated with women from thereon wasn't over some "cats and women are sly and selfish, dogs and men are straightforward and loyal uwu" dichtonomy.

It was about cats' tendency to go "I am 4kg of whoop-ass and if you try to touch my eight beautiful children I will fucking kill you."

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seed of lodoicea, or coco de mer. the largest seed of the plant world. native to the seychelles

#huh

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Obsessed with the DC tourist asking for clubs with a “no ugly people allowed” policy that plays house

Is this person NYC or LA? Place your bets

#amazing #glad you're doing well phalloids

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nickgentryart

#good art

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as creatures who transmit culture via storytelling, we have something called "narrative logic" that acts as a quick-and-dirty method of orienting ourselves to something that hasn't happened to *us* until just now (but apparently something approximately like that happened to *someone,* or was once seen as plausible enough to make up a story about, or something. there's more going on there but that's at least one function of storytelling).

and then ofc as we learn how things work at a finer grain, we learn about how the real world violates narrative logic by actually trying to build real stuff or getting jobs where we have to know about all of the fine details that don't make a very good story, or whatever.

and usually we exist in kind of a soup where our sense of narrative logic is always sorta running and so is our sense of everything we know about the world from direct experience (or from people who claimed very credibly that they were telling us about a direct verifiable experience and explicitly *not* telling us a story). and when something weird happens we kind of run through all of our ways of knowing about stuff to see if we have any ideas about how to handle it.

a walrus showing up at the door would be very very weird both in terms of most "real world" models and in terms of narrative logic; a fairy at the door is only weird in terms of the former.

and unless you're the kind of person who spends a lot of time thinking about how you think about stuff *and* you have a somewhat unusual drive to prioritize the accuracy of a real-world model over your repertoire of narratives, you may be more *disoriented* by the stupid walrus because you will likely have *fewer ideas about how to orient.*

or you would have, if you hadn't just spent a week absorbing thousands of words of discourse on this stupid topic.

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Do y’all wanna hear about some absolutely crazy shit going down in the birding world right now

#hobby drama

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I think whoever named worcestershire sauce that should have the worst tummy hurty ever

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realizing I often read those sections as "thanks to everyone who put up with me while I was really annoyingly fixated on this work" 😂

acutely dismal when I hit the acknowledgment sections of a novel and the author got help from like 20 people. I am not willing to be helped by 20 people. I would rather die without achieving any of my dreams

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#recipes

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#good art

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If you’ve never been all that disobedient before, you can and should start really, really small. For example, you can wear the slightly revealing or gloriously trashy-looking garment that makes your mom roll her eyes and sigh despondently every time she sees you put it on. You will feel judged and disapproved of when you put it on, but that is fine. Your goal is to sit with the uncomfortable feelings and continue with your desired behavior anyway.  Saunter down the steps in that highlighter-yellow Garfield crop top with your chest hair flowing over the neckline, and harness as much courage as you can muster. It’s okay if you feel like a beacon of sin. Just keep it moving. Your emotions are not the target here. Your behavior is. You can feel however you are feeling in the moment so long as you keep acting like you’re free.  Do you have a favorite TV show that a partner or roommate vocally hates? Try watching that show around them without apologizing or defensively joining them in mocking the program. At first, you probably won’t be able to enjoy the show while in their presence. You’ll feel self-conscious about everything they find annoying or cringe-inducing about the show, and so focused on their reactions that you can’t relax. That’s okay. Allow those feelings of embarrassment and guilt to exist and pass through you without giving up. In time, you will be able to ignore these reactions more, and enjoy the activity.  You want to see the needle of discomfort moving down just a little, like Link’s body temperature meter in Tears of the Kingdom when he puts on a breathable outfit in a hot climate. You’re not gonna go from roiling hot to frosty cold in an instant. But after a certain point, you won’t be actively in pain anymore. Things are just gonna slowly suck less, bit by bit, until they are finally okay. That’s true of most major life adjustments, I find.  Probably the best way to develop self-advocacy skills while growing in your distress tolerance is simply by telling other people no. Do this without explanation or hedging. Nitpicky aunt wants to hear all about your dating life? “No, I don’t want to talk about that.” Unreliable ex-friend wants you to do them the tiny favor of moving their entire home gymnasium into a new third story walk-up? “No, I’m not available.” Manipulative shift supervisor wants to cajole you into sticking around for another three hours to close? “No.”  As many advice columnists smarter than me have already intoned, “no” is a complete sentence. “No” requires no explanation. “No” is not subject to debate. “No” can be repeated over and over like a broken record if a disrespectful person acts like they can’t hear it. And you can walk away at any time to make your “no” physical and impossible to argue with, when someone has proven they don’t respect your boundaries. 

you can read or listen to the full piece for free here

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Please please take this in the affectionate manner in which it is intended but "guy who failed the examination forty times and despondently wrote one of the great works of Chinese literature in between failures" has incredible @etirabys energy

the imperial chinese examinations are a godsend for enjoyers of pathetic historical men such as myself. they gave rise to so many types of guy, such as: guy who failed the examinations like forty times and despondently wrote one of the great works of chinese literature between failures; guy who failed like ten times and decided “you know what? this is bullshit. this all has to go” and started a brutal peasant uprising; guy who just barely passed and was suddenly thrown into a very high military position, which he has ABSOLUTELY no training for; and guy who failed several times, faked a degree, got hired by harvard to teach chinese, had his fake degree discovered after he got to boston, begged harvard to let him teach because otherwise it would be really embarrassing for them all, taught like seven students, and died of pneumonia

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Sort of odd but I've ended up being in contact with the family. I have permission to share a few things:

- the windows were open and Badger is okay.

- the family had already been made aware of his death by the time I was pinged on twitter but were touched that people looked into his absence.

- they weren't allowed to read his blog but knew about it and knew that "he was very happy with his online community and the friends he had made."

Sad news: @kontextmaschine seems to have been found deceased at his home in Portland.

I don't have more information than this. His address was tracked down and a mutual arranged a wellness check earlier today, after reddit/Twitter user barrypcotter raised the alarm about his lack of recent activity and reported physical symptoms. But without more information about his legal identity, this is all the info that was released.

rest in peace friend.

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Sad news: @kontextmaschine seems to have been found deceased at his home in Portland.

I don't have more information than this. His address was tracked down and a mutual arranged a wellness check earlier today, after reddit/Twitter user barrypcotter raised the alarm about his lack of recent activity and reported physical symptoms. But without more information about his legal identity, this is all the info that was released.

rest in peace friend.

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Toddler loves talking about the colors of our eyes and gets angry if we neglect the cornea and the pupil. So we all have [color] AND black AND white eyes.

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HUH

It's interesting to me how much people struggle to intuit differences of scale. Like, years of geology training thinking about very large subjects, and I'm only barely managing it around the edges.

The classic one is, of course, the mantle- everybody has this image of the mantle as a sort of molten magma lake that the Earth's crust is floating on. Which is a pedagogically useful thing! Because the intuitions about how liquids work- forming internal currents, hot sections rising, cool sections sinking, all that- are all dynamics native to the Earth's mantle. We mostly talk about the mantle in the context of those currents, and how they drive things like continental drift, and so we tend to have this metaphor in mind of the mantle as a big magma lake.

The catch, of course, is that the mantle is a solid, not magma. It's just that at very large scales, the distinction between solids and liquids is... squirrely.

When cornered on this, a geologist will tell you that the mantle is 'ductile'. But that's a lie of omission. Because it's not that the mantle is a metal like gold or iron, what we usually think of when we talk about ductility. You couldn't hammer mantle-matter in to horseshoes or nails on an anvil. It's just a rock, really. Peridotite. Chemically it's got a lot of metal atoms in it, which helps, but if you whack a chunk of it with a hammer you can expect about the same thing to happen as if you whacked a chunk of concrete. Really, it's just that any and every rock is made of tons and tons of microcrystal structures all bound together, and the boundaries between these microcrystals can shift under enormous pressure on very slow timescales; when the scope of your question gets big enough, those bonds become weak in a relative sense, and it becomes more useful to think of a rock as more like a pile of gravel where the pebbles can shift and flow around one another.

The blunt fact is, on very large scales of space and of time, almost everything other than perfect crystals start to act kind of like a liquid- and a lot of those do as well. When I made a study of very old Martian craters, I got used to 'eyeballing' the age based on how much the crater had subsided, almost exactly like the ways that ripples in the surface of water gradually subside over time when you throw a rock in to a lake. Just, you know. Slower.

But at the same time, these things are more fragile than you'd believe, and can shatter like glass. The surface of the Earth is like this, too. Absent the kind of overpressures that make the mantle flow like it does, Earth's crust is still tremendously weak relative to many of the planet-scale forces to which it is subject- I was surprised, once, when a professor offhandedly described the crust as having a tensile strength of 'basically zero;' they really thought of the surface as a delicate filigreed bubble of glass that formed like a thin shell, almost too thin to mention, on the outside of a water droplet. On human scales, liquid is the thing that flows, and solid is the thing that breaks. But once stuff gets big or slow or both, the distinction between a solid and a liquid is more that a liquid is the thing that doesn't shatter when it flows. And it all gets really, really vague, which I suppose you'd expect when you get this far outside the contexts in which our languages were crafted.