Does anyone else feel, like, a weird inhibition against starting new TV shows?  Like, there are shows I want to watch but when I think about sitting down to start it something in me goes “no you can’t just do that.”  What am i waiting for?  I feel like I need to prepare?  Brain:  You have to wait.  Me:  Wait for what???  Brain:  WAIT

I found out recently that it’s due to not having enough emotional or mental space to process something new. Got too much going on in your own head/real life already.

Me: I would like to experience this new thing.

My Brain:… no.

Me: Why not?

My Brain: Can’t do it. Not today.

Me: Whyyyyyyyy?

My Brain: Because we are processing at capacity and one more stream is going to crash the whole system. 

Me, aloud: I’m not in the mood to try (new thing) right now.

THIS IS A REAL THING??? ARE YOU SHITTING ME?!!?

Wow. that explains… so much

No wonder I can barely start new anime or cartoons anymore.

This also can be a very common issue for people with ADHD or other conditions that cause emotional dysregulation, even if you’re not actively Going Through Something at the time. Like, the knowledge that it’s going to evoke an emotional response in you means you’re more likely to keep putting it off because you have trouble returning to an equilibrium after an emotional spike. Like, shows that I have been REALLY INTO, like SUPER INVESTED, with lots of feelings involved – I have to take breaks between new episodes of it and go back to watching things I’ve already watched before that I know how they end, and I’m prepared for the emotions that go with them, to give myself a break from the emotional spikes and exhaustion of being surprised – even pleasantly – by the media I’m watching.

Oh gdi…

We’ve got an itinerant cheese-selling woman who comes into town every Friday morning to sell the cheeses she purchases from local farms, and I like this old-fashioned way of buying cheese (other people, like the mayor, find it mortifying that our village is too small to support its own cheese shop). She stations herself in the plaza and likes to share news about the farms and villages she’s visited this week (at the moment we get a lot of baby animal news, like new calf announcements.) She has the unfortunate habit of denigrating her own cheeses without meaning to because she is a cheese perfectionist. You ask for a bleu, she grimaces hesitantly and says “Ah, poor choice, it doesn’t look quite right to me today”; or you tell her “I really liked the brie I picked last time, so creamy!” and she shakes her head and goes “Ah, you got lucky, often that farmer gives me such shitty brie with a chaulky texture—” then she suddenly looks frustrated with herself, you can tell she’s thinking “why am I giving this information to a client?? I’m the worst cheese saleswoman ever.” It’s very endearing. 

She also sells eggs, and always writes the name of the farmer she got it from on each carton so you can make sure to buy your friends’ eggs and avoid your enemies’ eggs. You’ve got to be like “Six Gilbert eggs please” and publicly announce where your loyalty lies, it’s a whole Thing. If one day you decide to go rogue and ask for Agnès eggs instead you can be sure people will notice, and they will talk. Getting my own chickens is the only way I have found to avoid pledging egg allegiance.

I am OBSESSED with this egg based clique culture

That carrot sounds really good

I’ve spent hours trying to play instruments and this guy just whittles up a carrot and kills it

The notes are so full of extremely salty clarinet players and I love it

I still stand by this statement, dude just drills up a carrot and knocks everyone flat off their socks while simultaneously ensuring that every single clarinet player who hears this is foaming at the mouth and out for his blood. Absolute legend.

Allow me to introduce you to Mr. Curly:

Feat. Mouth Sounds and Mx. Duster.

imagine if the oceans were replaced by forests and if you went into the forest the trees would get taller the deeper you went and there’d be thousands of undiscovered species and you could effectively walk across the ocean but the deeper you went, the darker it would be and the animals would get progressively scarier and more dangerous and instead of whales there’d be giant deer and just wow

you have a beautiful imagination

this gave me chills

HOLY SHIT

first of all ^^^ I love this^^^

secondly, I’ve said it before, but 

this is exactly what the Old World was. Off shore there was Ocean, and inland there was Forrest

Here’s an Old World tree still surviving in a modern forrest of “large” trees

That’s just what trees used to be like.

And wandering among those trees, one might have encountered, yes, deer larger than a modern moose, but also, depending on what year, pigs bigger than grizzly bears, beavers the size of modern wolves, ground sloths the size of modern elephants, and bears nearly that big. Not to mention the insects and snakes and shit.

I could keep going, like, you might have crossed paths with a whole herd of these

or a family of these.

Like, 29,000 years ago, the last of the Neanderthal had just died out. Humans and this thing definitely lived at the same time.

And they didn’t live in the Forest, but there is one ice age creature that’s still alive, if you want to see what life was like back in the day. We used to think the Musk Ox was a type of bovine, or cow, which is how it got it’s name. BUT. See this?

that, my friends, is an ice age GOAT. That’s right, that’s a 900 pound GOAT. Here, take another look

anyway, yeah, the wild used to be a lot more Wild. Old Forest was definitely the inland equivalent of Ocean, and everything back in the day was turnt the fuck UP

This post was made by someone’s genetic memory of those scary fuckers

Besides training all the major Greek heroes, Chiron was also a doctor.

That would make him the Centaur for Disease Control.

*sigh*

He was a strong supporter of herd immunity.

Have you ever heard someone say something SO straight that you can’t even process it right away? Like it’s not homophobic or ignorant or anything its just SO straight that you have to sit there for a few minutes silently because your queer brain can’t even process it?

fuck that’s valid

when someone’s dog comes up to me for attention and its owner says “oh yeah he’s a real playboy, really into the ladies” and are you trying to imply your dog is hitting on me. your goddamn dog.

Everybody be fighting like a ninja these days. It’s like a prerequisite to wear a fancy suit or something. I however adhear to the Peggy Carter form of Hand to Hand combat. Ie. Fight like a pub brawler, stab a guy with your high heel, flip a table then gtfo of there.

So far. It’s been working alright.

Christian Soriano is bae

Humans Are Weird

So there has been a bit of “what if humans were the weird ones?” going around tumblr at the moment and Earth Day got me thinking. Earth is a wonky place, the axis tilts, the orbit wobbles, and the ground spews molten rock for goodness sakes. What if what makes humans weird is just our capacity to survive? What if all the other life bearing planets are these mild, Mediterranean climates with no seasons, no tectonic plates, and no intense weather? 

What if several species (including humans) land on a world and the humans are all “SCORE! Earth like world! Let’s get exploring before we get out competed!” And the planet starts offing the other aliens right and left, electric storms, hypothermia, tornadoes and the humans are just … there… counting seconds between flashes, having snowball fights, and just surviving. 

To paraphrase one of my favorite bits of a ‘humans are awesome’ fiction megapost: “you don’t know you’re from a Death World until you leave it.” For a ton of reasons, I really like the idea of Earth being Space Australia.

Earth being Space Australia Words cannot express how much I love these posts

Alien: “I’m sorry, what did you just say your comfortable temperature range is?”

Human: “Honestly we can tolerate anywhere from -40 to 50 Celcius, but we prefer the 0 to 30 range.”

Alien: “……. I’m sorry, did you just list temperatures below freezing?”

Human: “Yeah, but most of us prefer to throw on scarves or jackets at those temperatures it can be a bit nippy.” 

Other human: “Nah mate, I knew this guy in college who refused to wear anything past his knees and elbows until it was -20 at least.”

Human: “Heh. Yeah everybody knows someone like that.”

Alien: “……. And did you also say 50 Celcius? As in, half way to boiling?”

Human: “Eugh. Yes. It sucks, we sweat everywhere, and god help you if you touch a seatbelt buckle, but yes.” 

Alien: “……. We’ve got like 50 uninhabitable planets we think you might enjoy.” 

“You’re telling me that you have… settlements. On islands with active volcanism?” “Well, yeah. I’m not about to tell Iceland and Hawaii how to live their lives. Actually, it’s kind of a tourist attraction.” “What, the molten rock?” “Well, yeah! It’s not every day you see a mountain spew out liquid rocks! The best one is Yellowstone, though. All these hot springs and geysers from the supervolcano–” “You ACTIVELY SEEK OUT ACTIVE SUPERVOLCANOES?” “Shit, man, we swim in the groundwater near them.”

Sounds like the “Damned” trilogy by Alan Dean Foster.

“And you say the poles of your world would get as low as negative one hundred with wind chill?” 

“Yup, with blizzards you cant see through every other day just about.”

“Amazing! when did you manage to send drones that could survive such temperatures?”

“… well, actually…”

“… what?”

“…we kinda……. sent……….. people…..”

“…”

“…”

“…what?”

“we sent-”

“no yeah I heard you I just- what? You sent… HUMANS… to a place one hundred degrees below freezing?”

“y-yeah”

“and they didn’t… die?”

“Well the first few did”

“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE???!?!?!?”

My new favorite Humans are Weird quote

“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE?”

aka The History of Russia

aka Arctic Exploration

aka The History of Alaska

Being from Alaska, this was sort of how I felt going to college in the lower 48′s and learned that no one else had been put through a literal survival camp as a regular part of their school curriculum, including but not limited to:

1. Learning to recognize all forms of animal tracks in the wild so you can avoid bears and moose and search out rabbits and other small animals to eat.

2. Extensive swimming and climbing on glacial pieces with competitions to see who could last the longest, followed by a group sit in the sauna so we wouldn’t get hypothermia (no, not kidding, I really did this many times as a kid!)

3. How to navigate using the stars to get back to civilization.

4. How to select the right type of moss from the trees to start a fire with damp wood (because, y’know, you’re in a field of snow. Nothing is dry.)

5. How to carve out a small igloo-like space to sleep in the snow to preserve body heat and reduce the windchill so you won’t freeze to death in the arctic.

“I’m telling you, I don’t think we need to worry about territory conflicts with the humans. You know all those deathtrap hell-worlds in the Argoth Cluster?” “Those worthless rocks? Yeah.” “80% of them are considered ‘resort destinations’ by those freaky little primates.”

“I’m telling you, they terraform for fun!” “Don’t be ridiculous” “No, seriously. Some of their most celebrated cultural loci are built on swamps. They have an entire city that is literally in a body of water. Not, like, an artificial pontoon city, they literally sunk the foundations into water. For Grilp’s sake, they build elaborate structures out of frozen water AND THEN SLEEP IN THEM.” “Dear Thilak. Think we could get them to terraform our moons?” “Psh, they’d probably pay for the privilege.”

Eventually, it occurs to someone that humans are the perfect terraforming shock troops, as it were. They think it’s fun to be sent to horrible planets! They’re really good at surviving and then taming them! All you have to do is sit back and wait until the planet is habitable, and then move there yourself! It’s genius.

It only takes one try before the reality of the situation sets in: human definitions of ‘taming’ and ‘habitable’ are woefully incomplete.

“Why did you not eliminate the venomous plant life?” Grahssk’ti moans, clutching one limb.

“Those?” The human laughs. “Why bother? They’re not that bad. And they eat the mosquitoes.”

Grahssk’ti shudders. The ‘mosquitoes’ are… not to be mentioned. Just one swarm of them caused a landing shuttle to crash three planetary daylights ago.

“And the acid storms? Why did you not warn us of them?”

“I mean, they’re annoying,” the human says, shrugging, “but we figured the cool sunsets made up for it.”

Grahssk’ti flails helplessly. “What about the ten-meter tall Fanged Death Bringers? They can eliminate an entire settlement in under an hour!”

“They’re so cute!” the human says, brightening. “Have you met mine? Her name is Spot!”

Humans are told of some planet or region of space that is considered “completely and utterly inhospitable - it would be folly to try and settle there.”

Without fail, a decent number make it a point to settle there because “Fuck You That’s Why.” It doesn’t matter how uneconomical it is, how difficult the conditions are, how utterly ridiculous it may seem, there will be at least one human who will attempt to do it only because someone else regardless of species says it is improbable or WORSE impossible. 

“This moon is still forming as such it is primarily soft - by that I mean most of the magma is close to the surface and-” ‘OH BADASS you mean its like Mustafar right!?!?!?! I’m totally going to build a castle there.’ “What. I mean. There is NO fertile ground there whatsoever. No ecosystem. It is molten rock and minerals only.” ‘Which will make my castle there look METAL AS FUCK am I RIGHT!?!??! Come on. COME ON. I TAUGHT YOU HOW TO FISTBUMP COME ON.’ “….you….you are going to die, you know this right?” ‘I’m getting the feeling you don’t want to come to Lava Castle for some reason?’

This is the quality scifi I sign up for.

Washoe was a chimp who was taught sign language.

One of Washoe’s caretakers was pregnant and missed work for many weeks after she miscarried. Roger Fouts recounts the following situation:

“People who should be there for her and aren’t are often given the cold shoulder—her way of informing them that she’s miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat [the caretaker] in just this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her apologies to Washoe, then decided to tell her the truth, signing “MY BABY DIED.” Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat’s eyes again and carefully signed “CRY”, touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human (Chimpanzees don’t shed tears). Kat later remarked that one sign told her more about Washoe and her mental capabilities than all her longer, grammatically perfect sentences.“ [23]

Washoe herself lost two children; one baby died shortly after birth of a heart defect, the other baby, Sequoyah, died of a staph infection at two months of age.

more about Washoe:

after the death of her children, researchers were determined to have Washoe raise a baby and brought in a ten month chimpanzee named Loulis. one of the caretakers went to Washoe’s enclosure and signed “i have a baby for you.” Washoe became incredibly excited, yelling and swaying from side to side, signing “baby” over and over again. then she signed “my baby.”

the caretaker came back with Loulis, and Washoe’s excitement disappeared entirely. she refused to pick Loulis up, instead signing “baby” apathetically; it was clear that the baby she thought she was getting was going to be Sequoyah. eventually Washoe did approach Loulis, and by the next day the two had bonded and from then on she was utterly devoted to him.

*information shamelessly paraphrased from When Elephants Weep by Jeffrey Masson.

Even more interestingly, after Washoe and Loulis bonded, she started teaching him American Sign Language the same way that human parents teach their children language. It only took Loulis eight days to learn his first sign from Washoe, and aside from the seven that his human handlers learned around him, he learned to speak in ASL just as fluently as Washoe and was able to communicate with humans in the same way she could.

now if y’all don’t think this is the tightest shit you can get outta my face

Omg I’m not crying you are

An extra interesting thing about this, I think, is that these primates are so clearly able to communicate in our languages through sign languages, and many have shown they’re able to understand spoken English to some degree. But despite recent researching proving there’s nothing physiological preventing other primates from being able to audibly speak English, they just can’t for some reason.

Which seems like it could potentially imply something very interesting regarding the brain and language. They’re mentally capable of understanding both ways of speaking, they’re physiologically capable of speaking in both ways, yet there seems to be some mental block that only leaves them able to express themselves in one.

It’s not a block, it’s an absence of an executive function. The connection between vocal cords and speech is a specific program. This stuff shuts off when I get too overloaded, as do some other executive functions; I can still understand language, I can still read and write, but no instructions are sent to my vocal cords. In the case of primate, they most likely just do not have the software to connect those two functions.

Apparently Judi Dench got bored one day and they created a Les Mis barricade character for her in  May 2004 for just one performance.

Holy shit that must have  been hilarious to see.

Here’s a picture:

Dame Judi Dench in Les Mis (May 2004)

“As the show started, the announcement was made: ‘At tonight’s performance the role of Javert will be played by Nic Greenshields, the role of Enjolras will be played by Alexis James, and in Act Two in the barricade scene Dame Judi Dench will appear as Madam Lafarge’.

“And, indeed, Dame Judi appeared in a suitably drab costume and mob-cap. She handed some ammunition up the barricade; she helped tie Javert to the chair; she was then hit by a flying bullet and sank dramatically over a table and was then helped offstage by one of the chorus. In total - say just under two minutes onstage!

“Dame Judi is appearing in the theatre next door and apparently has some 45 minutes between scenes. Yesterday she popped next door and said it would be fun if she could walk on at the start of the barricade scene since she had the time available and is a great fan of ‘Les Mis’. They had a quick five minute rehearsal between shows yesterday and tonight - on she went.” (source including more photos)

That is the best thing I’ve ever heard.

a resource

Robert E. Lee himself refused to wear his confederate uniform after the confederacy’s defeat in the American civil war. At his funeral he was not buried in it and no one in attendance was permitted to wear theirs either. He also declared that his confederate battle flag (what we now call “the confederate flag”) never be raised again and that it was a flag of treason.

So there’s your “southern heritage.”

Not Just Robert E Lee, which you can read here. 

but Also the President of the South, Jefferson Davis felt the same way. 

Basically, “Get the fuck over it.” We lost, we’re a part of this country, this flag signifies an old identity. Cut that shit out and move on. 

And Robert E. Lee’s decedents are also calling for the statue to come down

THIS POST MAKES ME WISH PINNED POSTS WERE STILL A THING

Gay Icon™ Andrew Scott Rannells, everybody.

“why, why is anyone good at sports?”

It’s also wild for them to say that when Japan, Korea China and Taiwan have robust film industries. Like that is objectively u true because over a billion people are watching,creating, and performing in expressive media. Like racist is a hell of a drug for them to say that.

*hollering*