Ben and Jerry’s is dangerous ice cream... capitalizes on the evolutionary human instinct to dig for chunks... before you know it half the pint gone

the children yearn for the mines

I feel like witches are sedentary and wizards are migratory. A witch has a home, a cauldron, herbs, you go to them with your problem. A wizard wanders, disappears, shows up at inconvenient times to fix nothing. am i making sense

Y’all ever fuck with a song so much you restart it before it’s even over?

— Anais Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diaries of Anais Nin 1939-47

— Calling a Wolf a Wolf, ‘What Seems Like Joy’ by Kaveh Akbar

Transhuman Dreams: Dreams of a genetically augmented future. Humanity is one. All of humanity lives in peace and prosperity. No military spending. Humanity is exploring the galaxy.

when the bugs have their uprising against humanity I hope they will spare me

Fool upon ye! When come the end, no power of bug nor beast shall spare your brittle, non-exoskeleton'd visage!

but I can open jam jars

So can a mantis shrimp

a mantis shrimp is confined to marine environments and has no incentive to open jam jars; I would be a valuable prisoner of war because I share the same habitat as the majority of jam-eating invertebrates

Ants have several options:

-Laboriously carry the jam jar to the edge of a great height, push it off, hope that it shatters, and then scurry down to the splattered jam and carry back what they can to their nests.

-Form aggregate hand-shaped masses out of their own bodies with tremendous prehensile strength and collective purpose to do the job of a twisting grip. I think this is the plot of Voltron.

-Evolve tool use. Battering rams? Hammers?

-Conscript the help of a creature with musculature capable of twisting open a lid, such as an octopus (finicky, short-lived, difficult to compel) or a me (terrestrial, opposable thumbs, vulnerable to ant bites)

tbh I’ve spent the past hour and change assuming they’d hand off jar duties to the rhinoceros beetles to knock off a counter.

I think bugs would form a coalition of invertebrates in the initial stages of the uprising, with war propagandists preaching the virtues of truce and alliance among Bugkind... but after the conquest of humanity, those coalitions would break apart, and it would be bug-against-bug once more. Were I a survivor of the Bug War, I think it would be wise to get cozy with eusocial hymenopterans... I certainly would not want them as my enemies. If I made myself useful to them, they could protect me from the other bug factions.

Which ones I need specifics

If I could secure an alliance with ants or wasps or bees (ideally multiple colonies of different species) and made myself a valuable resource worth protecting, they could defend me from other bugs, like botflies and ticks, which may have more unpleasant and less tolerable interests in me.

interesting tactic. which if any bugs eat those ones

One complication I can foresee is my cozy history with spiders coming back to haunt me. If I cast my lot with predatory wasps, will I be betraying my old friends, the spiders?

Despite my affection and admiration for them, spiders are not terribly useful allies. They are poor organizers and have no skill at war-making, and they are not very mobile. I worry that the wasps would try to get me to broker a deal with the spiders—peace, in exchange for a tithe from their number.

Perhaps—but, if I were forced to negotiate a deal like this, I might try appealing to sexually mature male spiders. The males of species of spiders seem to voluntarily throw themselves into the jaws of the female after mating, as if begging her to use the nutrients of his body for better reproductive success. Not that he would live long after mating anyway, but culturally they might have some concept of self-sacrifice... albeit in a reproductively self-serving manner.

Much to think about.

@glumshoe you seem to have thought about this a lot

Have you had a glass of water? A snack? A nap in the past 12 hours?

while you were partying, I studied the best way to survive the postwar political fragmentation of the hypothetical insect uprising

propaganda to influence spider cultural norms would probably be helpful. If you could manage to manipulate their society to the point that recurring bacchanals were beloved tradition it could end up being like a racier version of a bachelor’s party for the sexually mature male spiders where you replace getting hitched with ritual sacrifice. thats a hell of an arrow to the knee

I have an Argiope aurantia eggsac under my protection that should be hatching any day now. If I begin normalizing the idea of sacrificial ritualistic sex parties to the new generation now, perhaps in a few years it’ll disseminate to other spider populations and it won’t be weird or uncomfortable when the wasps expect me to provide them with spider hosts for their young.

what purpose did we domesticate these for.

Baby that you don't have to burden with the concept of morality, or worse: math

Favorite Hozier Lyrics [1/?]: NFWMB - Nina Cried Power EP

+

Brothers.

I thought this was one of Tumblr’s weird ads for skin care

Dermatologists HATE him