a cat-filled zone

she/her I write, I reblog, and once in a blue moon I make a post of my own. currently on a Batman kick!

[a-large-orange-cat]

Tim Drake would be an incredible supervillain, and in a less fortunate universe, someone else realizes how smart he is before Batman figures it out.

my new Tim fic is titled hand in unlovable hand (a chokehold). Black Mask gets ahold of a very smart eleven-year-old Tim and realizes he can make use of that. and Tim realizes, eventually, that he can make use of Black Mask to fight crime in Gotham.

the first chapter is up now on Ao3! it’s pre-written, beta-ed by a friend of mine, and will update weekly. we start a little heavy on the angst so check warnings as you need to!

[a-large-orange-cat]

this fic is now complete with an epilogue! it's also gotten out of hand and other works in the AU are coming up, so check it out!

[hellenhighwater]

I was waiting for something and wound up watching part of an episode of the Apprentice UK and discovered a new fun fact about myself: watching people who claim to be good at negotiating fuck up literally the most basic negotiation tactics fills me with a wild animal rage

[hellenhighwater]

Anchoring (in negotiation) is a term for the way that the first number put on the table by a party sets the scale for all the other numbers used. For example, I could start a negotiation by telling you that I sold a painting at a thousand dollars. Your brain will take that number and latch on to it as a benchmark. If I were to then later say that I had a certain painting available for $500, your instinct will be to see that as a great deal. And if I were to then say I have another painting for $2000, your mind is naturally going to come back to the first number I gave you as a price comparison.

What the idiots in this show are doing, constantly, is saying that they're trying to get X amount of money for something, and then that's the first number they put on the table. They're anchoring with the number that is their target point. It's bad strategy. It leaves them nowhere to go but down, which means they're missing the target every time. If they were anchoring at, say, twice what their target price was, they can use that baseline to convince the other party that they're being offered a great deal when they negotiate down to their target price.

[hellenhighwater]

Just as another note, because everyone should know a little about how to negotiate: if you're going to give a number, give the explanation for the number first. As soon as a number is given, the other person is going to be focusing on whether that number works for them, and will likely focus less on any explanation given after.

So you don't do: The painting is a thousand dollars, because it takes months to complete. Instead: This painting is the product of months of work, so I would ask a thousand dollars for it. It's a small thing, but you get less sticker shock when you preface the number with the reason for it.

[nerdygaymormon]

[dunkthebiscuit]

This is why Pride is not just a party. It's a joyful celebration, but it's also a pointed and colourful two-finger salute to a world that stood back whilst so many of us died. And we'll never go quietly, never again.

[byjove]

I can’t remember if I told you guys this but my grandpa paid a guy to put up a rock retaining wall in the backyard when my grandparents moved into their house in 1966. They live at the bottom of a mountain. The wall finally collapsed this year and my grandfather with dementia was PISSED OFFFFFF and he wanted so badly to call the guy who did it and chew him out for doing a bad job. My grandma is trying to explain that the wall lasted 60 years and the guy who did the work is probably dead and it TURNS OUT HE IS STILL ALIVE. Now we’re worried grandpa is going to get through to him (small town) and we’re going to see two 85 year old men come to blows over a rock wall that has been there since the mid-60s. My grandpa is a scrapper, he’s been to jail over a bar fight, the possibility that he WOULD fight this guy is high.

To top it off? The stone mason is the only person in town with one arm so grandpa would definitely recognize him if he saw him. If that is your grandpa, please protect him from my grandpa.

[homunculus-argument]

"I learned a lot from making this" is artist talk for "making this sucked ass and I'm not entirely happy with the result."

[literalnobody]

no this is the hill YOU die on. because i’m gonna kill you for disagreeing with me

[acti-veg]

‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

[namu-the-orca]

Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.

It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.

[ireniggg]

I fuck wit title-only text posts. this shit is like talkin in an apartment hallway loud as fuck out the window

[heedra]

so far one theme of the 30s for me has been realizing that literally every human being on earth who appears completely cool and collected and together with it at first glance has some threshold past which enough known information about them will shatter that mystique completely. i don't even say this negatively or pessimistically it's just been helpful to keep in mind that we're all like that.

[stabbydragon]

"Love/sex is what makes us human" Wrong. It's the obsession with rectangles. look around you and count the number of rectangles you see.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#looked up and thought ‘that can’t be hard’#and then my eyes widened with horror as I realized the sheer number of rectangles everywhere#I’m . I’m horrified

It's a good shape!

[eroscestlavie]

This just pissed me off so baaaad 😂

[treasuredplanet]

in hindsight sending the number one digit at a time created the funniest half second of either of our lives

[nessochist]

Kandy G. Lopez R ² - Roscoe and Reggie 2024 Yarn and acrylic paint on hook mesh

Orlando Museum of Art’s 2025 Florida Prize in Contemporary Art

[rat-king-they-them]

[rat-detector-24-official]

Rat detected. Make him jiggle.

[mutipede]

Holy shit I assume everyone is doing an up and down jiggle and maybe a side to side jiggle but if you jiggle your phone forward and backwards he jiggles in and out, too

[nonaferatu]

people hate it when i say "black people getting cancer is racist" but im literally fucking right because systemic racism has led to chemical dumping being acceptable in black/brown neighborhoods and black people have higher rates of cancer as a result

[somegaypersonsblog]

[meanbuddhist]

i want freedom i want freedom i want freedom *is granted freedom* noooooo my attachments