stellar's jay

30s, some kind of masc sapphic, cis of trans experience. growing, learning, helping, becoming. (she/he both work)

[westernmassposting]

ITS HOT

Like much of the world, this week we are going to be experiencing an intense heat wave.

If you dont have access to strong enough AC, please find your local cooling centers! Many libraries double as cooling centers, but not all of them.

Here's a WWLP article that lists some cooling centers open during this particular heat wave, and heres 413Cares a website thats been collecting cooling and warming centers for years. Use another resource to make sure those locations are acting as cooling centers for this particular heat wave.

Museums also tend to have very, very good AC to keep their items safe, and all the five colleges' museums are free and open to the public.

Grocery stores are typically kept extra cold to make you hungry so you buy more.

For many of us, the water out of our tap comes out very cold. Hold your wrists veins-side-up under the water for a while to cool down your entire body.

Personal fans, ice water wraps around your neck, and sticking your feet in ice water can go a long way for beating the heat.

Swamp coolers/evaporative coolers work well in lower levels of humidity, but can be dangerous at higher levels of humidity. They raise the humidity in your own space, which makes your sweat significantly less effective. They are easy to DIY with a fan and materials you probably already have. Check your local humidity forecast daily before using them, and just use a fan when its too humid. I wouldnt use a swamp cooler in any of the orange temperatures on this chart, and I'd be really careful about using one in any of the yellow parts of the chart.

THIS POST CONTAINS INFORMATION FOR THE WESTERN THIRD OF THE USA STATE OF MASSACHUSETTS. WHILE ITS CONTENTS MAY BE APPLICABLE ELSEWHERE, THEY ARE NOT APPLICABLE EVERYWHERE. LOOK FOR LOCAL GUIDANCE.

[massachusetts-official]

Official Post of Massachusetts

[javascript-official]

Oh you see the world in black and white? Fuck you get dithered

[3000s]

tumblr giveaway

reblog to win one of that

[c4zer]

oh ok

[everythingseasoning]

Obsession did something really cool… it made the real horror feel quiet, undetectable, and deniable— if you’re not aware of it. Because the real horror wasn’t how possessive, terrifying, and uncanny, Nikki could be.

The real horror was Bear not seeing nor caring about how violent his wish and complacency was for Nikki. The real horror wasn’t in the haunted-doll-like apparition of Nikki watching Bear sleep, or moonwalking backwards like some cursed rewind clip… that was scary, but it wasn’t the theft of autonomy, the self-erasure, the neglect and rewrite of somebody’s inner life.

The real horror was Bear being quietly and totally destructive, and then seeing himself as the victim. The real horror is violation that doesn’t announce itself boldly. The real horror is that most doors that lead to evil are opened quietly, unceremoniously, softly and subtly, by an entitled hand. The real horror is when there is nobody else who sees the unfairness, the despair, and there is no repair or justice.

Think about it. Curry Barker said Nikki is probably fucked and going to jail for a long, long time. Nikki’s friends all told Bear she “lost it” and it’s “not your responsibility” to help her. Nobody cared. Nobody intervened. Nobody noticed how bloody Bear’s hands were.

[anatomyofaburnout]

This ties in with something I've been thinking about how Obsession uses horror vs. terror. Yes, it's a scary movie, but it's scary in two ways.

There's the jump scares, the musical stings, the gore, the slow-motion-and-backward-walk -- the terror. But there's also "It doesn't matter to me" and the "she's sleeping" scene and Nikki alone in the world with bodies she did/didn't kill -- the horror. Obviously many if not most horror movies have elements of both, but Obsession has a plethora of scenes that are just horror. Quiet, heart-rending, and petrifying.

[anatomyofaburnout]

my voice is timid and quiet. the words come less quickly to the call of pleasantries. It is breathing my air and obstructing my throat.

[anatomyofaburnout]

was wondering if the timing of my feeling awful was linked to the anniversary of jc's death, so I went through my calendar and photos and call records. it's not exact but it's pretty close: 1 week will be a year from the "she's in the hospital" call, 2 weeks a year from the "it's worse than we thought" call, 2 and a half weeks the anniversary.

maybe this sudden and inexplicable depression is entirely explicable.

still feels awful and horrible and i'm still making that job change. and I don't know if it will last (or even get worse?) over these 3 weeks too. but at least I have a good idea of why everything is suddenly heavier.

I want to get that memorial tattoo.

[fleshdyke]

???

[professionalchaoticdumbass]

you have to call someone now

[edderkopper]

Today I learned that cuttlefish experience REM sleep, and that it makes their skin flash random colors. This is the cutest thing ever.

[blackbearmagic]

The electric eel at my aquarium has a voltmeter attached to his tank, and whenever he pumps out a burst of electricity–either when he’s navigating his tank or getting fed–the meter lights up and makes noise. Sometimes, I’ll walk past him when he’s snuggled up and totally motionless on his log, and see the voltmeter going crazy.

I am left to assume that he is dreaming, and is sleep-zapping at the things in his dreams.

[arachnospooky]

I am absolutely delighted to learn that electric eels dream of kicking ass.

[targuzzler-deactivated20180224]

[mothyr]

weed before cider youre meeting the spider. cider before weed time for centipede

[anatomyofaburnout]

I'm so so tired and can't feel happy and want to cry 25% of the time and have a void creature living near my diaphragm eating my being from within. my job suck and hurts me and I don't know what I'm going to do about insurance while I'm in school and i'm making bad decisions about alcohol and on top of all that I'm not acting on any of the things that could maybe start to help me feel a little better. because I'm so drained from the feeling bad. this is p much as close to depression as Ive come in the past couple years outside of the winter holidays.

[anatomyofaburnout]

well i did drink too much last night and ended up with a bad hangover BUT i realized my mistake and went to bed so I could make the early as fuck appointment I had forgotten about. instead of postponing it (again). like yeah I fucked up step one but I stumbled through the execution of the plan regardless

[userfish]

baseball fights are better than hockey fights because everyone expects a fight in hockey. baseball fights are some real hater shit

[userfish]

ABSOLUTELY COMICAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[pankendev]

there are places in the world today that are experiencing 40°C for the first time in recorded history. of course there's no way to know whether chucking billionaires into volcanos will appease the sun god but i feel we're doing the scientific method a disservice if we don't at least try

[that-house]

Making a shitty one-page RPG called Oh Shit It’s the Killer. The premise is simple: you’re a high schooler spending the weekend in the woods with your besties. The Killer is there also. He is trying to the Kill you

[that-house]

I say shitty not to demean the quality of my work but because it’s less an exercise in good game design and more an attempt to induce paranoid internal conflict that turns into murder (in game of course). It has like three mechanics and one of them actively encourages you to murder the other PCs

[that-house]

Great news!

It’s done

I put like three braincells into this, so if there’s anything about it that outright sucks, uh. Sorry not sorry, L + ratio + let’s use the 1-page restriction as an excuse for any unfun mechanics

[that-house]

“What if there was a game about being a genre-savvy slasher protagonist murdering their way to the role of Final Girl?”

“Sounds cool when exactly does the PvP start”

“character creation”

[closet-keys]

it's only recently I learned that the 'mog' part of 'mogging' stands for 'male of group' (shortened from 'alpha male of group'). so the definition of 'mogging' as like, being deemed superior to someone else in some way or another is using manhood as synonymous with relational superiority.

this was obvious subtext anyway (the whole ideology in which the term emerges is a male supremacist one) but learning it's so explicit and unambiguous was kind of surprising. doubly so since this term is already starting the process of integrating into general usage outside this subculture, first as "ironic," then as decontextualized ("it's just outshining someone!"), and eventually probably as sincere.

casual reminder that it is probably best to not adopt the misogynistic concept of conveying hierarchical superiority in interpersonal contexts as "funny internet slang."

[headspace-hotel]

knowledge

Information and knowledge are not the same.

Some knowledge can't be transmitted via written language.

[Memory: I bob and weave while sparring, I spin fibers into thread using a drop spindle, I carefully dig up the roots of an oak tree without damaging them, I crack a hickory nut with a round rock, I shape clay on a potter's wheel]

Most knowledge has never been encoded into written language.

[the tiny bees that visit the frogfruit plant, the hiss of the wind in a canebrake, the scents of mint, oregano, diesel and orange peel in the leaves of wild herbs, the spicy bark splitting from a tulip poplar sapling, the rotting wood, the stagnant water, the patterns of the fireflies, the bumblebee pollinating the gentian, the mycelium, the shape that different roots make in the soil, their color and texture]

Whenever I talk to someone who knows the plants, I get into a spirited disagreement with them. Experts who learned from experience can never agree, because instead of absorbing the written information from a unified canon of sources, they absorbed the knowledge from their own experience, and every experience is different.

Using our minds, we absorb information; without our bodies, we cannot know. Knowing requires the organism to feel, sense, engage in behavior, and experience connections.

[I see the plants. I recognize the plants. I visit the plants. I look closely at the plants. I touch the plants. I sit with the plants. I feel the plants. I cut the plants. I crush the plants. I destroy the plants. I trample the plants. I kill the plants. I dig up the plants. I nurture the plants. I give life to the plants. I prune the plants. I burn the plants. I make something from the plants. I use the plants. I smell the plants. I gather the plants. I weed the plants. I visit the plants in the height of summer, in early morning and late evening, in the chilly days of fall, in the snow, in the spring, in the rain. I taste the plants. I enjoy the plants. I process the plants. I compost the plants. I cook the plants. I eat the plants. I consume their body. I breathe their breath. I know their names. I am a living creature among living creatures.]

The physical world, the living world of living creatures, is still here, all around us.

[There is, in the cracks and at the edges of an abandoned concrete slab, a thicket of wild raspberries. The raspberry planted itself. The raspberry grew itself. No one owns the raspberry, or even knows it is there; the raspberry owns itself. Take and eat; it is a gift. Taste and enjoy; you are an animal with a body that needs, a body that feels.]

Know the wild plants, but I cannot tell you where to find the plants, or how to learn them. It is not information. It is knowledge.