Rain

dduane:

lierdumoa:

Cringe started as a verb describing a physical reaction, i.e.: “I cringe when I see [x].”

Modern slang has turned cringe into an adjective describing anything to which a person might have such a reaction.

.

This shift in language is illustrative of a shift in culture.

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For a while there, in the early 2000s, there was this big sex positivity movement and we talked openly about kink and queer sexuality and creating a culture of consent that broke away from traditional conservative ideas of moral respectability.

And now we are in the midst of this giant purity culture backlash, this giant push for rigid conformity all over the internet. Anything that deviates from the norm even remotely is ridiculed.

And this cultural shift is perfectly encapsulated in this singular linguistic shift, this verb becoming a noun.

The Revenge of the Pearl Clutchers

That’s what “cringing” is. It’s pearl clutching.

When the pearl clutchers turned cringe into an adjective, they turned a reaction into an accusation. The pearl clutchers don’t want to take responsibility for their own kneejerk emotions. They want to blame YOU.

They are saying, “My disgust isn’t the fault of my own backwards prejudices. It is YOU who are inherently disgusting. My inability to cope with even the slightest deviation from norm is not the problem here. YOUR refusal to rigidly conform is the problem. I am not the one who is cringing. YOU are the one who is cringe.”

Fuck ‘em.

.

Take the word back.

Cringe is not something people are.

It’s something judgmental assholes do.

This. THANK YOU.

(via neil-gaiman)

coffeepeople:

sometimes I wonder how we all survive and then I look at my best friends and I go “oh, I survive because I don’t want to leave you yet” and it makes sense. life is so hard a lot of the time, but I want one more bowl of pasta with you.

I suppose it’s an odd kind of freeing that I don’t have anyone to eat pasta with anymore.

It’s like I finally have permission to leave.

(via jadedmeatbag)

a-dinosaur-a-day:

gallusrostromegalus:

beefgoat:

fesenmoon:

ALT

ALT

no fucking way

I thought crocs were so dumb, they simply tried to eat anything that caught their eye. Now they’re learning?

What’s next?!?

Nah Crocodilians (the group containing all 23 extant species of crocodile, aligator, caiman etc) are actually really smart, they’re just a PAIN IN THE ASS to study in the wild because they’re stealthy, don’t eat or move that often relative to mammals, and are largely nocturnal. That said, we’ve found evidence of:

• Coordinated Group Hunting across many species of crocodilian- AKA, hunting like a pack of wolves.
• Advanced Parental Care- we knew for a long time that American alligators and Gharials built nests and mothers kept their young close, but GPS tracking has shown that the father(s) also typically stuck around and brought mom kills, but the young stay inside the territory of their parents for 3-5 years, until they reach sexual maturity.
• Nile crocodiles dig enormous and surprisingly complex burrows up to 40 feet deep that they share with other crocodiles- parents and children, but also adult siblings and Unrelated “Friends”- crocs that are frequently seen close together outside as well, but do not appear to be mates. many of these burrows are decades, if not centuries old, are actively maintained, and passed down through generations.
• Amazon Caiman (a type of alligator) recognize individual humans (possibly by voice), and alter their behavior around them based on past interactions. Some of them become quite playful with humans they’ve had positive interactions with in the past, and others hold “grudges” against specific humans for decades.
• All Crocodilians engage in all major types of play behavior- Locomotor play (engaging in a behavior because it brings positive stimulation), playing with toys (Sticks, leaves, carcass, and in one paper, a floating squeaky toy that had gotten into the Bayou) and social play (Playing with other individuals). Several species, but notable Caiman and Alligators also Play with animals outside their species- young caiman have been observed playing with Amazon Giant River Otters, and Alligators playing with sharks and dolphings off the US Gulf coast. Play behavior is associated with a high degree of intelligence in animals.
• Male Saltwater crocodiles in Australia employ a variety of complex mating strategies, including offering courtship gifts (tailored to the preferences of individual females), sucking up to larger males to get better introductions to females (A Long-Term strategy that pays dividends- while the beta males don’t typically mate the first two or three years they try it, the ones that stick with the strategy mate with more females as they age), and doing “Off years” where they pass on the fighting and displaying and just nap and get fat instead- another strategy that pays off long-term: Big Males that engage in Off-Years mated more in On years, and lived longer overall, for a larger lifetime genetic impact.
• Many zoos have had success in training captive crocodilians to do “tricks”- mostly pose behaviors that let keepers examine, vaccinate or medically treat the animal with minimal stress on all sides. But they’re also apparently good at “Sit up” and “Roll over”.
• And as far as “Trying to eat anything that caught their eye”- pretty much all carnivores, but especially crocodilians, make pretty complex calculations on whether or not to pursue something as prey based on, but not limited to: How hungry they are, what the future prospects for food are based on the weather/season/behavior of their prey/how many other carnivores are competing with them, the likelihood of injury (either in the process of hunting, or from the prey itself), and whether the effort expended is going to be worth the reward (based on projected strategies, how full eating something like that made them last time, and if they’re going to suffer weird consequences for it).

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have they done a neuronal study on crocodilians? I wouldn’t be surprised if they also had a higher density like their closest cousins, birds

(via willow-wanderings)

patroklos52:

In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.

~ Ed Yong, NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22

(via commonplacerfollowshisbrush)

bomberqueen17:

star-anise:

blueelectricangels:

star-anise:

akhmenos:

touchmycoat:

star-anise:

@trustmeimageographerreblogged your post and added:

Hi I’m a fantasy writer and now I need to know what potatoes do to a society

They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.

The main staple of medieval agriculture was grain–wheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value. 

Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour ground–and it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief. 

Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeast–either it’s made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the village’s communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or it’s made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months. 

Potatoes, in comparison…

Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europe–they beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I don’t know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practically…

When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.

Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if you’re not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)

You store the ones you don’t want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.

Potatoes don’t just feed you–they free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasant’s control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. It’s very open to exploitation.

TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didn’t really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say “Oh yes, potato blight, very tragic,” and ignore the whole “The English were taking all the grain” aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.

So… yeah. I realize it’s very counterproductive to explain to everybody why I’m always like “OMG POTATO NO” when I wish I could just chill out and not care about this. But the social implications of the humble potato are rather dramatic.

#very cool! #reference #this is why taxes on china were collected in rice too #for the same grain reasons #bc the peasants just ate yams which were quick and easy to grow #but rice is backbreaking excruciating work that keeps the peasant population under control #and requires a collectivity and organization that the bureaucratic state can provide #ESPECIALLY since you need irrigation for rice even more than you do for wheat and stuff #and irrigation planning and upkeep is a huge part of a local bureaucratic official’s duties in ancient china #i had no idea about the miller stuff in medieval times that’s very fascinating #there’s a lot to be said for how monks were healthier #bc they got to grow vegetables #and they were allowed economic autonomy as a result #but there’s another essay for that (x)

I’m a little curious tho, how does just seeds from the grain go bad?

Like if they lose their nutritional value so quickly how do they get planted the next year?

Part of how medieval farmers avoided the problem of grain spoilage over the winter was to plant their grain crop in the late autumn, and let it start growing over the winter. Then they’d sow again in early spring. The winter crop might get blighted by the cold, or it might come up early; the spring crop might not sprout as much and would take longer, but it might help you out if your winter crop failed. They were kind of hedging their bets in an imperfect system.

Faster causes of of grain spoilage are visibly “something has ruined this grain”–insects, molds, or vermin get in at the grain, so your grain is much more likely to be eaten, pooped on, or rotten when you take it out of storage. 

If you can get grain to survive those quicker methods, eventually grain can spoil simply by being exposed to air. After a few months the oil inside it oxidizes, which destroys a lot of its nutrients. You might get it to sprout six months later, but it’s a lot less nutritious if you eat it, and if you grow it the plants will get less of a head start before they have to rely on their root system to bring in nutrients from the soil.

Very occasionally, archeologists turn up ancient seeds that still sprout, but those seeds are usually exceptionally well preserved–for example, sealed in a jar in a tomb that was undisturbed for thousands of years and magically it never got hot or wet enough to spoil. But you can’t store large amounts of grain like that, partly because the simple existence of large amounts of grain will attract pests that will spoil it. The ones that survive are the one-in-a-million cases.

My absolute favourite under-acknowledged agricultural hazard is self-heating and thermal runaways.

If a plant isn’t actively growing it is, in fact, decomposing - the speed at which it’s doing that depends on things like external temperature, moisture, etc and can be anywhere from very slow to very fast.

Stuff that is decomposing produces heat.

Grain is an amazing insulator, so all of that heat gets trapped in the middle of the bin.

High heat encourages more decomp. Which produces more heat. Which produces more decomp. Which, eventually, can lead to a thermal runaway, in which the grain passes its ignition point and begins to smolder. (And if you’re really unlucky, that can spark a dust explosion.)

This is one of the reasons that grain farmers are Very Concerned about moisture content - high moisture content means faster decomposition, and thus faster spoilage but also the risk of your grain bin blowing up. Modern farmers carefully control the moisture content and air circulation of their stored grain to maximize quality and shelf life, while avoiding inconvenient explosions.

I don’t know that medieval farmers ever would have produced enough grain to be at risk of thermal runaway - but there are hazards to storing large amounts of grain even aside from pests and loss of nutritional value.

I feel almost certain I’ve read of medieval city fires that started in moldy haylofts and silos.

Thermal runaway can happen to hay as well. Hay stored indoors under a roof will last well as usable animal fodder for a long time, but only if it is VERY dry when put in, and a leak in the barn roof can cause a fire by this method– if the hay gets wet and starts to decompose, then it’ll catch itself on fire. This is still a problem in the modern day, and causes barn fires to this day.

But yes the importance of the potato cannot be overstated. Potatoes can become dangerous in storage too but this is much rarer.

(via roach-works)

thesaltofcarthage:

anyawen:

The teenager was asked to write a short scene or draw a short comic using a comedic trope from a list on a handout in their HS American Lit class. They chose to do the comic …

the Bard will never die.

and this comic is fucking genius.

(via writingbiologi)

1oldbear:

dracula61:

Fun with Slo-Mo.

(via mirkwood-spider-express)

sarahseeandersen:

stabbyflower:

cursmudgeon:

borderlineborderline:

cognitohazardous:

i love that you can get high off of nutmeg and it fucking sucks so you get videos like this

Omg so I did a project on nutmeg highs for a college level psychopharmacology class one time. It’s my favorite project ever.

Some highlights about nutmeg (might not be perfectly up to date but we’re accurate as of the early 2010s):

There are only 2 known fatalities attributed to “overdoses” on nutmeg. One of them was an 8 year old boy in the 1800s who ate several grams….. To treat him, the doctors injected a combination of brandy (yes, the liquor), a smidge of cocaine, and some other highly questionable substances I don’t remember the exact details of. (May edit this post later to add them). After the “treatment,” he died. Was it the nutmeg that killed him or the (literal) cocktail straight to the blood that could perhaps kill a grown man? The world may never know.

Update: it was 14 grams, and in 1908.

The dose of nutmeg needed to get high is approximately 5 grams. The toxic (NOT lethal, toxic just means ‘starts to make you feel some degree of very sick’) is also 5 grams. This means that in basically every instance in which a person successfully uses nutmeg to get high, they also feel very ill. Most people report nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain, at the very least.

The nutmeg community is WILD. Part of my project required that I quote actual users from testimony somewhere online. The stories I read were so absurd that they still live in my head rent-free almost a decade later. Every single story (except ONE, see below) were indeed tales of utter misery.

One was a guy who ate 10g of nutmeg before his sister’s wedding. He reported that the wedding was “not very enjoyable” as “the cake tasted like dirt” and dancing felt like “being a puppet pulled poorly and roughly around by a bad marionette.”

Another reported doing nutmeg and becoming convinced he had destroyed his brain. He said he stared out the window of his second floor apartment and “looked down at the other people, the normal people, the ones who weren’t going to be 30 IQ points stupider for the rest of their lives. I envied them for what they had. They didn’t even know. I would never be like them again.” He reported that he was fine a day later after the high wore off, and swore he’d never do it again. I still remember his username. RIP thelittletripperthatcouldnt.

The final guy, though. His story was the strangest. He LOVED nutmeg. He nut(meg)ed every day. For 12 hours each day he would watch porn and do nutmeg. He had done this for months. He was happy. He recommended nutmeg to everyone. I did not include his take in my presentation.

The title of the presentation was “why you shouldn’t do nutmeg”. I used the Chiller font. Don’t do nutmeg, kids.

My favorite fun fact about this is that Malcolm X talked several times about taking nutmeg.

My favorite not so fun story is from the time I interned at a vegan bakery. I got to hear the story of a guy who used to work there who just really liked the taste of nutmeg and didn’t know it would get you high, so he loaded up a milkshake with three tablespoons of nutmeg at the start of his shift. He spent the rest of the shift curled up in a corner hallucinating that bats were attacking him.

e

(via defuse00)