Untitled

sigh, it’s me again. sloka 30s/m/usa

[aliveandfullofjoy]

“the ad-dressing of the cats” in cats: the jellicle ball really bears the weight of the ballroom concept in such fascinating ways. old deuteronomy is like “you must always, always, always call us by our names!” and you think “this is beautiful, this is a dramaturgical miracle, i can’t believe t. s. eliot wasn’t actually writing about trans people,” and then old deuteronomy is like “and also?? feed us salmon :)” and you think “?”

[brown-recluse]

i started watching star trek for the first time (tng) & it’s so funny how most of the aliens are just like. humans with very slight physical modifications?

i suppose i understand why this is the case for practical reasons, but like. the implication of most other life forms in the universe looking mostly like some guy with an unusual forehead is so: ????

[brown-recluse]

being his boy is funny because with like anyone else in the world i would 100% roll my eyes at invoking the concept of “authenticity” but with him i’m just like. eternally a puddle of goo

[brown-recluse]

I met a guy at the dungeon when we last went who introduced himself as “sir thomas” but for whatever reason my brain cannot accept that at face value and instead immediately jumps to interpreting the name as like, a half thomas the tank engine half sir topham hatt reference of some sort

i am Confident that was not the intention of this like 60yo serious-looking leatherman lol

(i do now love the idea of sir topham hatt adopting the ‘sir’ as a BDSM thing)

[brown-recluse]

i’m not sure i have any mutuals to whom this applies but a thing i am curious about is like, being polyamorous/open/whatever when u are a sub in a D/s relationship that has a strong like, Devotion vibe?

i can’t figure out how to position myself such that i keep my core devotion focused on my daddy but also like - am open to other dynamics, scenes, whatever & able to fully engage?

maybe i don’t need to be open to anything else; i am quite content just being his boy :) :) :)

but, i can also see the value in exploring more, esp since like, (a) alllll my bdsm experience to date has been with this one man, and also (b) there are things that are less his wheelhouse that i would like to explore (eg more intense pain, ritual/protocol stuff, etc)

I imagine I’ll figure it out if/when someone interesting comes along, but also wonder if there’s a way to make myself more open to the possibility

[igneousbody]

"In the 1960s, after his seminal work on barn owls, Roger Payne switched his attention to whales. In 1971, he published two historic papers. (...) The second showed that fin whales—the second-largest animals after blue whales—make extremely low-pitched calls that can be heard across entire oceans. It nearly destroyed Payne’s career.

That controversial paper was born of the Cold War. To listen for Soviet submarines, the U.S. Navy installed chains of underwater listening posts in the Pacific and Atlantic. This network, known as the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, picked up a deluge of oceanic noises. Some were clearly biological. Others were more mysterious. One especially enigmatic sound was monotonous, repetitive, and low, with a frequency of 20 Hz—an octave below the lowest key on a standard piano. This hum was so loud that people doubted it could be coming from an animal. Did it have a military origin? Was it produced by underwater tectonic activity? Did it come from waves crashing on some distant shoreline? The actual source only became clear when Navy scientists started following the sounds to their sources, and often found a fin whale at the end.

Human hearing typically bottoms out at around 20 Hz. Below those frequencies, sounds are known as infrasound, and they’re mostly inaudible to us unless they’re very loud. Infrasounds can travel over incredibly long distances, especially in water. Knowing that fin whales also produce infrasound, Payne calculated, to his shock, that their calls could conceivably travel for 13,000 miles. No ocean is that wide. Together with oceanographer Douglas Webb, Payne published his calculations, speculating that the largest whales “may be in tenuous acoustic contact throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.” The response was brutal. Leading whale researchers told him that his paper was pure fantasy. Colleagues hinted that critics had been questioning his mental health behind his back. “When you get to distances like that, people just refuse to believe that it’s true,” Payne tells me.

Payne’s work made a more positive impression on Chris Clark. A young acoustician and former choirboy, Clark was recruited by Roger and Katy Payne to be a sound technician on a 1972 trip to Argentina to study right whales. It was a thrilling and formative time. Camped on a beach beneath the Southern Cross, with penguins bumbling past and albatrosses wheeling overhead, Clark began listening to whales. He placed hydrophones in the water to eavesdrop on their songs and found ways of assigning specific recordings to individual whales. He went on to compile libraries of whale calls, recorded all over the world, from Argentina to the Arctic. And all the while, Payne’s idea of giant whales talking over oceans stuck with him.

In the 1990s, with the Cold War over and the threat of Soviet subs diminished, the Navy offered Clark and others a chance to observe real-time recordings from their SOSUS hydrophones. Amid the spectrograms—visual representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked up—Clark saw the unmistakable signal of a singing blue whale. On his first day, Clark saw that more blue whale vocalizations had been recorded from a single SOSUS sensor than had been described before in the entire scientific literature. The ocean was awash with their calls, and those calls were coming in from enormous distances. Clark calculated that one individual was 1,500 miles from the sensor that recorded it. He could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone situated off Bermuda. “I just thought: Roger was right,” he says. “It is physically possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean basin.” (...)

Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. It’s possible that they’re signaling to nearby individuals with very loud calls, which just happen to extend further afield. But Clark points out that they repeat the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise intervals. A singing whale will stop calling when it surfaces for air, and come back on the beat when it submerges. “That’s not arbitrary,” he says. It reminds him of the redundant and repetitive signals that Martian rovers use to beam data back to Earth. If you wanted to design a signal that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d come up with something similar to a blue whale’s song.

Those songs might have other uses, too. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field. Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. “I could illuminate the ocean,” the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far-reaching infrasounds. Geophysicists can certainly use fin whale songs to map the density of the ocean crust. But can the whales do so?

Clark sees evidence in their movements. Through SOSUS, he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters between Iceland and Greenland and making a beeline—a whaleline?—for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives, accruing sound-based memories that lurk in their mind’s ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador or off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years?”

The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.

Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. Those ancestral creatures probably had vanilla mammalian hearing. But as they adapted for an aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies. At the same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest Earth has ever seen. These changes are probably connected. The mysticetes achieved their huge size by evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill. Accelerating into a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a million calories in one gulp. But this strategy comes at a cost. Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over long distances. The same giant proportions that force them to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of other animals.

Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long distances. If they simply called when fed and stayed silent when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky individuals have found. A whale pod, Payne suggested, might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone but are actually together."

- Ed Yong, An Immense World : How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

[brown-recluse]

why is arts funding like this lol

“well you see, the stickiness is because of all the cum on the floor”

[brown-recluse]

had my annual review and my supervisor joked like, we’ll make you sign it in blood, and i accidentally had an “oooh 👀 😋” response to that suggestion lmao

[girlbloke]

giving unread book back to the library makes me feel like i should be shot

[unsentimentaltranslator]

The fact that some people say things like this while other people think it’s totally fine to starve children is something that really should be talked about more.

[girlbloke]

period i am against that for sure

[brown-recluse]

c’mon AI, you know which i’m looking for

[brown-recluse]

the way i saw this on fb and had to scroll back up bc i initially assumed it was an IML post lmao

oh that’s a cop-cop

just looking glam for the hell of it

the brass thing on the hat is so excessive?

[brown-recluse]

instagram showed me a clip of an etiquette class for children (idk) and now I’m just thinking like. do they make those for adults lol because wouldn’t that be nice?

the teacher was teaching them how to introduce two people (“Matthew, this is my brother Steve, Steve, this is my friend matthew”) and I feel like a semester of that when I was younger (or now?) could’ve like. transformed who I am as a person lol

[brown-recluse]

Do yall keep getting snippets from this couples therapy show on your insta/whatever?

I guess maybe it’s just rage bait lol but it does truly astound me the degree to which people get/stay in relationships where they are like. zero percent happy or getting anything out of it

break up! leave! good lord

[diehellasrache]

I think I'm going to remember this phrase every time I cook for the next five years

[brown-recluse]

hee hee yesterday i:

went to a dungeon party w my daddy

where he made me cum just from flogging me >:)

and again from yanking a string of clips off my chest >:)

and where two people came up to him afterwards and complimented him >:)

(I don’t know which parts they were watching? I had a hood on)

he had signed up for a tear down volunteer shift and at first i was annoyed but it was actually nice because I’m soooo bad at introducing myself to people generally in a social setting but if i have a Task then it’s less of a concern. so i chatted with a couple of people instead of being nervous lol

then we came home & i got to give him a lil massage and then he fucked me for a bit and came inside me >:) which is not a common part of our/his repertoire!!! but which i love / find v hot. like it’s less than five times in three years that he’s cum inside me, so it feels ✨special✨

maybe i should get involved w the 15 association? If I sign up for more volunteer shifts then I suppose i will become familiar and talk to more people. (actively meeting people just by going to the parties is, i think, unlikely; i simply get too concerned about intruding on people / the thought of Starting a Conversation with a stranger is a nightmare)

generally speaking i don’t know that i particularly want my social life to be like. in the gay BDSM scene necessarily. but it does interest me that they skew older & how long many of them have been in the scene for. could learn some stuff & probably meet some interesting people I’d imagine

people are in leather at these parties (i, obstinately, feel particularly like - I Shan’t, Thank You because it’s common/expected, lol) but i don’t think they’re so posture-y or aesthetic-driven in the same way you see at like, the clubs or Folsom or whatever. some older guy was telling me how he used to be a Beast of Burden and carry shit on his back for his mistress & master (a couple?) doing heavy farm labor. i guess my thing with leather culture is that i mostly find the aesthetic boring and also the masculinity fetish but i do of course find delight and wonder in the arts of pain and subjugation and love that people are out here being. You know. Beasts of burden or whatever

[brown-recluse]

i do not find silicone lube at all comfortable for anal penetration / its so weird to me that that’s the most common choice? there’s no cushion! a water-based gel or an oil-based cream are both substantially more pleasant. what gives

[brown-recluse]