storytime

Owning a black cat is awesome because you’ll leave the bathroom and The Shape will be waiting for you

String identified:      g a   ac  cat    a         ca       ’     a   t    at      a   T     a            a t  g         

Closest match: Raphanus sativus genome assembly, chromosome: 4 Common name: Radish

Did you hear that buddy?

You’re a radish.

drives me up a wall living in a very very red district, like “no democrat is ever going to win any local election, let alone a real leftist” district, like “our school board members ran on who was the most anti-mask” red, like “I pass white supremacist signs on the way to buy weed” red

and being in the local leftist community and the guy who runs the anarchist book club and the lady who helps keep the warming shelters open and the people who marched on city hall when a local business was getting death threats for having a drag show are all members of a discord and we get on this discord and have frank discussions about how best to vote

the people who do the protests and the mutual aid and all the real work

going “okay, they’re both fascists, but this one lacks ambition and seems happy to just glide in the position” or “they both suck, but this one can be reasoned with if you frame it patriotically enough” like we don’t even have a democrat to vote for. we know what a vote is. we know what we hope accomplish with it. we know what it can do, and we know what it can’t.

and going from those discussions to here where people think that your vote is some kind of fucking??? enabling maneuver??? as if someone isn’t going to end up in that seat regardless of what you do???

we didn’t build this system, we just live in it. we’re just trying to survive. a vote isn’t a statement of your values, it’s not an endorsement, it’s not a marriage contract, it’s a strategic play you make to keep alive.

the biggest mistake I see leftists making is overestimating their own popularity. “well but everyone would be leftist if they just-“ no, stop, 1) you can’t possibly know that 2) everyone will not just

one of the best academic paper titles

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

I still don’t understand

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

Don’t Hesitate by Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

One of my coworkers was telling me that they had seen these really cute trilobite plushies at another gift shop and recommended them to the store manager at our museum, which lead to us scrolling through the manufacturer's website together on shift today and SHRIEKING with laughter at the exact same moment when we simultaneously noticed that they sell a giant $100 eurypterid body pillow

Now THIS is what I like to see!!

one lives on my lab couch and 10/10 can confirm best thing to spoon with

#they released these at a conference i was at in 2019#i was working a table right next to the pri#people went CRAZY#they sold out in 10 min#and all these grisled old phds were carrying around 5 foot long eurypterids the rest of the day (@barrysjumpsuit)

Hello thank you for the most critical supplemental information I’ve ever received on a post.

@linddzz

Hey, y'all remember this post? Well the institution that makes these delightful pillows and stuffed creatures is hurting right now. Unfortunately, a major set of donations never went through, and the institution has been working its butt off to keep running. The efforts of the staff are amazing, but unfortunately it's a very small nonprofit organization so it can only get so far on hard work and dedication.

In spite of all this! Through some amazing marketing and philanthropy work, you can help them out right now! You can make a difference! They managed to get a lovely donor to agree to a match challenge for up to $50,000!!! So if they raise $50,000 they'll actually get $100,000. The match challenge ends on December 31st 2023, and they're already at $26,4448.10 which means they're halfway there!! Please spread the word, if you can't donate then a reblog to someone who can will help.

If the link above doesn't work, you can find the donation page here:

HE’S OK but my heart isn’t

He’s an asshole and likes to jump up on the banister and walk around and it scares me so bad every time, but I guess this time he didn’t make the landing and went over instead.

The man himself for reference

Somebody ate a hole in the flour.

Any idea who it could be?

in fics where luke gets plopped into the prequels i want every jedi within ten metres of him to think hes the weirdest jedi theyve ever seen. he has negative lightsaber form. he doesnt know what a kata is. he handstands when he meditates. his solution to sith is to try and have a chat. hes a political radical who keeps suggesting revolution. you ask him what the jedi code is and he says "kindness and compassion and helping those in need :) ". you ask how he used the force like that and he says some shit about how you are a luminous being limited only by your mind. the councils authority is just a suggestion. he is somehow the new favourite of both qui gon and yoda

Now I'm imagining a situation like in Terry Pratchett's Night Watch where Luke admits to Mace Windu, "I came here from another time."

And Mace looks at Luke's completely unrefined lightsaber style, his profoundly philosophical insights about the Force, his disdain for authority, and his lack of knowledge of Jedi doctrine, and asks, "From how far back?"

So I did a fic version of this.

Mace Windu panted, the Force fizzing through his veins, then focused his mind and will and brought everything about the fight together.

Inhaled, and felt all the tension and grief and loss, all the triumph and energy, that had fuelled the most intense fight of his life.

Exhaled, and let it go into the Force.

Any battle in Vapaad was a dance on the razor’s edge, and this had been far more of that than normal.

“Thank you,” he said, turning to the man in the office with him.

“My pleasure,” Luke replied, with a respectful nod, and Mace took the opportunity to study the young man.

dnd paladin character concept: a knight raised alongside a magic user, who loves his friend, considers them family — but the magic user through a twist of fate ascends to godhood, vanishing from normal human life. so the knight swears fealty to the fledgling god so he can have some connection to them even still & the god who loves him dearly in return blesses him with gifts and divine powers as a way to reach back toward him, back toward earth. this paladin’s vows are easy to keep, like second nature… and prayer is both automatic and personal

can you imagine being a new god’s firstborn devotee? their most beloved, their milk tooth? he knew his god when they were a lanky teenager and helped lie for them when they used to sneak out of their studies. the two of them would crack each other up late at night until they thought they might hurl. no other paladin knows his god as intimately and well — he saw them pimply and awkward and human and real, and worships them even still. that kind of devotion is impossible to manufacture

the paladin chooses a quest to follow, with the caveat “should my god allow it.” he goes to pray by the river — they used to seek the river together every time they made large decisions, and it was by a river he swore his sacred oaths — and murmurs “will you allow it, old friend?” to the water. a flower blooms at his bent knee. (his god trusts his judgement; they will never forbid him any path he requests to follow.)

as soon as we explore 100% of the ocean all the fish will become 2x stronger and a new area will unlock

i learned that actor Danny Trejo has the most on-screen deaths of anyone in Hollywood history, with 65. Followed by Christopher Lee (60), Lance Henriksen (51), Vincent Price (41), Dennis Hopper (41), Boris Karloff (41), and John Hurt (39). (x)

Yet poor Sean Bean is stuck with the reputation for dying in every movie. Unfair.

Give him time, he still has many years of dying yet to come.

Also there’s the question of density vs quantity. If you make a hundred movies and die in 50, and someone else makes 30 movies and dies in 30, the first one has died more, but the second one has died more often per movie.

It’s the DPM ratio that really counts, IMO.

65/402 16% Danny Trejo 60/282 21% Christopher Lee 51/259 20% Lance Henriksen 41/211 19% Vincent Price 41/205 20% Dennis Hopper 41/204 20% Boris Karloff 39/209 19% John Hurt 33/117 28% Sean Bean

I’m so proud of the statistical side of tumblr for coming through on this.

I grew up on stories of the Dust Bowl.

My dad’s parents were Okies–environmental refugees, before anyone had a word for it. They left their families, the land they were renting, their animals, took their 1-year-old daughter, and drove to California. My grandpa worked in a peach packing plant. My grandma cleaned houses.

They were so lonely that after a couple years they went back to Oklahoma, with their total savings of $20. Later, they bought land. Built a house. Survived.

My mom’s dad was a kid then, and his family stayed in western Kansas. Stayed because my great-grandpa was too damn stubborn to leave, stayed when their neighbors had all left, stayed because they didn’t have enough money to leave. They slept with wet rags over their faces. My great-grandpa tied a string around his waist, tied the other end to the house, and went to check on the cows, while my great-grandma tried to make soup from a little milk and a little flour. There was so much dust swirling in the air, the soup turned to mud. She cried, begged her husband once more to let them leave, and they went to bed hungry.

My grandpa’s oldest brother was the first one in the county to leave his wheat stubble in the field instead of plowing it under after the harvest. His neighbors made fun of him. His parents scolded him for having messy fields. 70 years later, at his funeral, someone told how people from Japan came to visit the farm, to see what he was doing differently.

More than 80 years after the Dust Bowl, I stood on a mountain in Ecuador watching, horrified, as a man with a tractor plowed a steep field. He would back up the hill, set the disk in the ground at the top of the field, and drive down, breaking up the soil, dragging it downhill. Dust billowed around him.

The man next to me, a rich-for-the-area farmer, sighed happily. “Look at all that dust. Isn’t that great?”

“What? No!” I was shocked.

“Why not? That’s what a modern farm looks like.”

I thought of the old black-and-white photos, dust clouds like black walls rolling in across the prairie. That’s what a modern farm looked like, too.

The next field down, four people and four oxen–well, dairy cows used as oxen–were planting. They used plows, too, but instead of a disk pulverizing the soil, their plow was a straight piece of wood, metal from an old leaf spring bolted to the end. One team of oxen used that plow to open a furrow, the women walking behind dropped maize seeds into the soil, and the second team of oxen dragged the same kind of plow just above the first, closing the furrow and burying the seeds. They walked along the hill–side to side, furrows running along the contour of the hill. If they were raising any dust, it wasn’t enough for me to see from across the valley.

The man with the tractor probably finished in an hour or two. The whole group, people and oxen and all, probably spent the whole day planting the same size field.

As the maize grew tall, you could see the difference: In the tractored field, the top rows were yellow, spindly, trying to root in the yellow-brown clay the topsoil had once covered. Down below, in dark, rich earth, the maize was tall, green, strong.

In Mali, years later, a farmer explained to a group of visiting scientists why, despite having made erosion control bunds, his rows of maize still went up and down the slope, instead of along the contour, parallel with the bunds. “Because of the wind,” he said, like it was obvious–because it was. In the rainy season, the wind comes from the south, and when storms come it blows hard enough to send dust and dishes and clothes left on the line flying and tumbling with it.

The rows of maize have to be parallel to that wind, or they’ll blow over. So sure, you can put the scientists’ earthen ridges in to block the downhill flow of water, but your rows can’t follow that meandering contour. Your rows have to face into the wind. 

For thousands of years we’ve been coaxing, wrestling, dragging our food from the soil. If we’re careful, and lucky, we can make our peace with it. If we charge into places unknown–the high plains of Kansas and Oklahoma, the steep slopes of the Andes, the storm-swept fields of West Africa–if we plow, and plant, and harvest without thinking? Without learning from the place? Dust clouds blackening the horizon, stunted maize on worn-out soil, crops blown down in  thunderstorms–the earth is forgiving, but only so far. We have time to learn, to make mistakes, to do what is easy even when it does harm, but only so much. Beyond that, we destroy the very literal foundations of our lives.

tractors and cattle and new-plowed fields

@copperbadge because I remember you using this as a plot point in Six Harvests

Oh yes – one of the reasons Lea survives as well as it does is that Wild comes home just ahead of the worst part of the Dust Bowl with a brain full of Aggie School, and gets his fellow farmers to terrace and rotate crops.

When I was researching the book, I encountered story after story like the ones above; if folks think they’re unbelievable I’m here to tell you they’re shockingly common. There are families in the midwest now who still put their plates and bowls away face-down because grandma learned as a kid that if you put them away face-up, they catch the dust. After the storms you’d have to sweep off the roof and the internal support beams because the dust would eventually collapse your house otherwise.

I will say – not to argue with but to augment the above – the farmers in the dust bowl weren’t stupid, and by-and-large they weren’t greedy or malicious. The reason we destroyed the heart of the country in the way we did is that they were fucked with. Land speculators, most of whom were greedy or stupid or both, worked on the thesis that “rain follows the plow” – that if you plant a prairie with crops and trees, rain will magically appear. Some of them based this on studies that themselves had been….let’s call it “hopefully falsified”…to support the theories of people who wanted the midwest settled; manifest destiny played a part for sure, but “rain follows the plow” was the curse of the dust bowl.

The farmers didn’t know better; how could they? They did what they’d always done, and had to do it harder and more after the economic collapse post-WWI, and the prairie simply wouldn’t forgive them for it. The indigenous people did know better, but the military genocide had already mostly swept through by the time the land was sold to farmers and stripped bare.

The fact that the midwest today isn’t a barren desert is a miracle of science and good governance, correcting what greed destroyed and poverty perpetuated. The good news is, the Earth is remarkably resilient and wants to grow things. The bad news is that it’s also indifferent to what humanity wants, and if we keep choking it, it chokes right back.

Particularly when the fragility of our topsoil is mentioned, but even these days just with discussions of climate change in general, I think often of the anecdotal story of the sign posted on an abandoned dust bowl homestead:

One hundred miles to water, twenty miles to wood, six inches to hell.

I’m thinking about how my grandma had this guy who was super into her, enlisted in the army and sent her pictures of himself laying on his bunk staring at her picture moodily. She was not into him in the slightest. But it’s the funniest fucking picture of all time. Teenagers do not change. He’s someone’s Pappaw now. That’s crazy to me. He probably thinks of my grandmother as the foxy one that got away.

The fact that she kept it for 58 years is even funnier. I was like “Who the hell is this?” and she let out an exasperated sigh and was like “That was [NAME]. He was in love with me.” Feelings very much not reciprocated for soldier boy.

I think this incident is so funny to me because it reminded me of girls my age screenshotting cringy conversations with horrible horny men and posting them in the group chat for everyone to see. I think of all those extremely horny and verbose historical love letters in museums dating back as long as humans have been able to write. I wonder if there was a caveman who made cave art to impress a possible mate but it was so bad she made a point of visiting the cave every year to show her friends and laugh at it.

Before my grandmother passed away, we were going through some old pictures and there was a man there that I had never seen before in a photo with my grandmother and then another photo of this man in a military uniform. I asked her who it was and she laughed, and said "Oh! That's a boy I knew in school! He wrote to me when he joined the service." She then leaned in conspirator style: "He would tell people I was his girl so they would leave him alone. He had a boyfriend you know." My grandmother was someone's beard back in the day.

That last addition made my day.

Okay.

There are two general directions from which one can come at an issue like this: the instrumental and the operational.

"Instrumental", the way I'm using it here, would have to do with aspects of the work of writing that involve the interaction of the writer with writing (and the written) through a given interface. These are, broadly speaking, external issues. They can be tweaked and poked at with varying levels of success, and when things have been malfunctioning, such tweaking usually shows results in the relatively short term.

Operational issues, though, are ones affecting what's going on inside the writer before (or during) getting anywhere near the interface. I'd say this is the kind of thing you're dealing with.

Operational writing issues can be challenging to debug...and even when their nature or causes seem clear, the the results of the debugging can take a while to implement. So before we start getting into this: with regret I have to tell you to set aside any thoughts of a quick simple fix.

Briefly: my guess—from the symptoms you've described above—is that something writing-associated may have happened to you a year or so ago, or perhaps earlier, as sometimes the effects of this kind of situation can take a while to manifest. (And that you're able to identify the time frame that clearly speaks well of your powers of observation.)

Now let's be clear: whatever this thing was that happened, it doesn't at all have to have been anything bad. In fact, it's just as likely, or maybe more, to have been something really good, a positive life change—a shift in a location or a relationship to something newer or better. But its effect in the longer run is that your relationship with your internal writing process has changed, or your perception of it (and the way it felt) has shifted. Or possibly both.

As regards analysis of the a-year-or-so-ago situation: even if you successfully identify an event that seems likely to have been involved... that identification, by itself, is unlikely to make any difference to your current situation. The shift has happened, and seeking to simply undo it by processing it somehow is likely to be a waste of your time.

The bottom line is that if I'm right about this, you and your interior writing process have for some reason started growing in a significantly new and previously unexpected direction. The reason writing doesn't feel easy or fun these days is that the new direction of growth is causing you to need to expend more energy and effort than previously—because growth does that. The sense of effortlessness that used to be there is missing now because the new, more complex level of function can't be carried on, or carried out, with the old sense of ease.

The tl;dr; Odds are strong that you're currently on your way to being a significantly better writer. You just can't do it on the same terms as you used to.

If this sounds like bad news, it's because of course you'd like things to just (after some quick useful instrumentational adjustment or other) go back to the way they were! Unfortunately, though, I think that in your case, that ship most likely sailed a year or so ago.

Your options now are somewhat limited. You get to either:

(a) Sit around where you are (developmentally speaking), writing "retrospectively" in an attempt to recall that sense of ease, and be really pissed off about this whole mess:

or,

(b) Admit the likely context of the growth change you're edging into, and start the work of pushing through where you are at the moment to the other side.

And the only way you're going to be able to do that is by just keeping on writing on a regular basis, even though you're not satisfied with how you feel while it's happening, or what's coming out.

I'm entirely aware that this isn't going to sound at all pleasant. It sure wasn't the last couple times I went through it.

I've had two, possibly three of these—let's call them "reconfigurations", for lack of a better word. Fortunately they haven't seemed to come oftener than once every decade and a half or so. Just as well, because they're really annoying. (Especially when you're on deadline at the time.)

I mean, here you are going about your writing life and everything seems to be running smoothly, and then all of a sudden there's some kind of triggering event. (Or an unexpected internal shift that simply coincides accidentally with an external event that might or might not have had anything to do with the internal events. Even with my psych nurse hat on real tight, I haven't always been able to tell.) In the long run, the reason for the shift hasn't mattered: it's simply occurred. There's no way to go back, and nowhere to go but forward.

The only good thing to say about this kind of situation is that eventually—assuming you don't give up, or try to cheat on the increased energy required to push through to the new level—you will come out on that far side significantly stronger and tougher and better a writer than you were before everything apparently went to hell. You will also find the enjoyment again, and a renewed sense of ease. But they'll be different sensations, hooked to different and more powerful levels of function.

If I'm right about all the above, you now have ahead of you a difficult and annoying slog. And it wouldn't be kind to pretend otherwise.

My advice to you, if any or all of this rings true, is to take the writing part of it in baby steps, but regular ones. And no matter how much you may have been accustomed to write in a day, you'll be wise to scale your expectations way back while starting to deal purposefully with this. You are going to have to push through the feelings of dysfunction and unease and regularly commit words to screen or paper whether you feel good about them or not. This is not going to be easy. You are going to have to build yourself—at least temporarily—a new normal, a version and experience of regular writing that doesn't depend on you necessarily having an easy or good time of it

You are going to have to keep reminding yourself that growing pains of this kind are normal; that you're building new mental "muscle mass" and "bone structure" to support the increased stresses of the writer you're going to be when you come out on the far side of this.

Now, the nitty-gritty. How long is this going to take?

Probably wisest to assume a matter of months. But beyond that, I wouldn't have data enough to predict how long this is going to take for a different writer. What I do know is that I didn't start seeing signs of improvement or increased ease of operation until I had both realized and acknowledged what was happening to me and stopped trying to go backwards to "the way things were". Then, slowly, like the crocuses coming up in late winter, things little by little began to shift. Those first green shoots won't come up all at once. But they will come.

Also possibly helpful: watch your diet. Make sure you get enough protein: boost your intake if you can. And a good B-complex supplement wouldn't come amiss, either. Brainwork needs those vitamins in particular.

In any case: good luck on the journey. This is going to be a rough haul... but you can do it. Go well. :)

It’s got me in a chokehold