Just a she/they poly transbian nerd in her early 30s sharing stuff I find like an old woman. Currently obsessed with swords and HEMA and desperate to get back to archery. I also write stuff @chridys-scribbles and share my bruises and riskier outfits at @barely-awake-sword-girl
Guess I should make a pinned post at last, for my reference at least.
Hi, I'm Katherine, or Kat, or a suitable pun though you have to be funny with it. I'm a big ol' nerd who is also pretty sporty but held back by a mildly broken body and terrible sleeping habits
I mostly just reblog here, but I do/did a bit of writing at @chridys-scribbles and have some fitness, outfit, and increasingly confident pictures at @barely-awake-sword-girl
Pictures of me are tagged #kat irl, if you're interested in that sort of thing. Otherwise I tag with abandon and rambles
Really though, what was that about? I don’t know is a valid answer. It communicates very clearly that the child cannot answer your question, and therefore maybe needs more help understanding the question/situation. Why do you try and push them to give an answer they don’t have? That stresses them out and it makes them feel like they’re being punished for not knowing something.
i thought i was the only one with an “i don’t know” problem because my parents made it seem it was the strangest and also most horrible thing in the world. i genuinely didn’t know and they got angry and that only blocked my thoughts more which meant i didn’t know the answer to anything else.
Also “I don’t know” is a commonly used sentence for children with ADHD/Autism. We DON’T know why we can’t do our homework. We DON’T know why we can’t eat certain foods sometimes. We DON’T know why we forgot to do a chore. It’s really distressing when you genuinely don’t know and people think you’re just lying or indifferent
What always gets me about learning about settler colonialism is how once you learn about it you cannot unsee the violence to the land itself. My home state was previously nearly 100% wetlands, apart of the wider Ohio river valley whose biodiversity supported such large populations of hundreds of different species that many contemporary source from settlers describe it as like the garden of Eden.
The Indigenous people who farmed and hunted here (and still farm and hunt in what land they have been able to keep and reclaim) were able to grow miles of upon miles of crops with multiple harvests a year, encouraging this biodiversity by creating forest gardens with incredible amounts of food from staples like corn and squash to local fruits like pawpaws to European imports like apples alongside controlled burns which allowed fields and buffalo ranges to expand.
Nowadays my state is known almost exclusively for its fields of nothing but corn and soy beans. Driving through in between the comparatively small cities you'll see nothing but fields where the plethora of different trees and plants were chopped down mile by mile, the remaining wetlands drained and flattened, and the rich black soils robbed of their nutrients through decades upon decades of monocrop agriculture now preserved through the life blood of petrochemical fertilizers which destroy the surrounding environment.
This process was done mile by mile as the tens of thousands of Indigenous people were killed and displaced by settlers and the US army, the land measured and sold acre by acre to white settlers who raped the land as described, filling the pockets of wealthy land speculators (like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) who bought the land directly from the government in schemes so corrupt historians have dedicated entire careers to mapping out their dramas.
It's like learning about commodity fetishism and suddenly seeing hundreds of strangers in the products that surround you. Once you learn how the land was destroyed for profit you'll never look at the miles of fields or the cracks in the concrete of buildings built on wetlands or the stench of now obsolete canals built solely for a once boat-dependent economy with no care for the environment the same.
Abstract. Evolution has produced an astonishing array of organisms, but does it have limits and, if so, how are these overcome and how have
An interesting paper (Vermeij, 2015) on the "empty phenotypic space", i.e. the forms and adaptations that we do not see in the living world, possibly relevant to the convergence vs. contingency debate.
Some examples:
Wheels: some curled-up arthropods can roll around, and bacterial flagella and some parts of weevil legs rotate on their axis, but macroscopic wheels with a free axle do not exist, probably because smooth surfaces on which they'd be useful are rare and it would be difficult to grow them through embryonal development.
Animal-provided pollination and dispersal do not exist in water, with the possible exception of one species of fish-pollinated seagrass (which is a descendant of terrestrial plants). Presumably water is already good enough at carrying gametes and propagules that buying the services of an animal is a useless expense.
Mineral reef-building does not occur on land nor, more surprisingly, in freshwater. The reason for the latter is not clear, since there are enough mineral ions in freshwater to build shells. Boring of rock, shells, and wood in freshwater is also extremely rare though common in the sea.
Gelatinous plankton like salps or jellyfish (with few exceptions of the latter) is also not found in freshwater, probably because they can't survive dispersal between separate water bodies.
Endothermy ("warm blood") is generally not found in small aquatic animal, probably because water leeches away heat much faster than water, so aquatic endotherms (tunas, sharks, seals, whales) need to be bulky. On land, however, endothermy is found among tiny vertebrates and even insects.
There is no passive air-floating plankton, since air is not dense enough to support living tissue or dissolved organic matter by buoyancy. For that reason filter-feeding is also rare outside of water, while carnivorous plants are not found in the ocean (the water already carries enough nutrient). Aquatic plants do not produce wood as buoyancy is enough to keep them upright.
Large terrestrial animals do not specialize as scavengers (all mammals famous for scavenging also hunt actively); large carcasses are too spread out. All specialist scavengers on land are either very small, or flying.
Herbivory is rare among active fliers, because plant matter has a low energy density and takes a long time to digest. Herbivorous birds and insects are poor fliers or flightless, and the best fliers, like geese, are the ones that can take shelter in water.
Many more examples are only excluded from specific groups (e.g. live-bearing, despite being very common in reptiles, never appeared in birds, probably because the bird egg-shell is too mineralized to be retained in the womb as transition toward full live-bearing).
Even though the author calls them "forbidden phenotypes", only some of them are actually impossible (because they cannot evolve in the first place, or because they cost more energy than they're worth), and others simply never happened to evolve. At the end of the paper there is a list of phenotypes that would have been "forbidden" in the aftermath of the Cambrian Explosion and Ordovician diversification, but which appeared later, and they include
cutins, suberins, lignins, flavonoids, alkaloids, vascular systems, roots, leaves, rigid frameworks of stems and branches, nutrition complemented by animal matter, and basal growth in land plants; nitrogen-fixing symbiosis on land; animal-mediated dispersal/pollination; silk-producing, sound-emitting, flying, eusocial, terrestrial herbivorous, wood-boring, terrestrial shell-bearing and endothermic animals; embryos nourished within the body of an animal or plant parent; mineralized phytoplankton; and rock-excavating marine herbivores. [...] photosymbiotic and chemosymbiotic molluscs, the bivalved condition in gastropods, terrestrial life in gastropods and vertebrates, complex septa within the phragmocone of externally shelled cephalopods, internalization and loss of the shell in cephalopods, cementation to the substratum with a glue of calcium carbonate and organic matrix in several animal groups (gastropods, brachiopods, bivalves and barnacles), spines on shells of several groups (brachiopods, bivalves and brachiopods), mineralized tubes in polychaete annelids, mobility in bryozoans and pelmatozoan echinoderms, jaws and teeth in vertebrates, and vascular systems in brown and red algae. A vast diversity of potent venoms also lay in the future as part of the defensive and aggressive arsenal of many gastropods, cephalopods, aculeate Hymenoptera, vertebrates and land plants.
He also mentions phenotypes that were lost, but every listed adaptation seems to have survived in some group (e.g. complex spiny shells disappeared among cephalopods but survived in gastropods).
The marine isopod Idotea balthica (Pallas, 1772) is commonly found firmly gripped to the red alga (Fig. 1A and movie S1) Gracilaria gracilis (Stackhouse) M. Steentoft, L.M. Irvine & W.F. Farnham. Using two sets of experiments, we tested whether I. balthica facilitates male gamete dispersal and fertilization in this red alga species either indirectly, through the creation of water turbulence when swimming, or directly, by carrying spermatia on their bodies.
Our results demonstrate for the first time that biotic interactions dramatically increase the probability of fertilization in a seaweed. The observation of mucilage-embedded spermatia attached to idotea body parts after visiting male gametophytes suggests that idotea may serve as “pollinators” in G. gracilis upon subsequent visits to female individuals (movie S1). If we draw a parallel with the Cox-Knox postulates that define criteria for determination of pollinators of flowering plants, our results are sufficient to prove that idoteas are efficient gamete vectors.
Although I. balthica grazes on other seaweed, it does not feed directly on Gracilaria but rather eliminates epiphytes at the surface of the thallus while protecting itself from predators. We suggest that the relationship could be mutually beneficial.
Animal pollination is generally thought to have originated during the Mesozoic for gymnosperms and angiosperms and was believed absent in mosses and ferns, in which fertilization is restricted to water. However, transport of male gametes by animals has been demonstrated recently in mosses, antedating animal-mediated pollination at the early phase of land colonization (~ 450 million years ago).
oh cOME ON
I mean, awesome! Another general statement that ends up disproven by evolution, I suppose -- though it's still significant that it took so long to find one instance of "pollination" in water when it's so common on land.
Terry Pratchett's take on The Little Matchgirl in The Hogfather is both devastating and incredibly up lifting. Here's the thing, I've read The Little Matchgirl too many times and thought, 'hey, that's kind of fucked up. Why didn't anyone save her?'
Only to get told that 'oh, it's a tragic little story that's supposed to remind you to be grateful for what you have and also to show you the horrors of poverty. At least she's in a happier place now.'
And none of that ever sat quite right with me.
But Pratchett calls this out. He has Death ask the question of why no one came to help, about the reasoning behind letting this little girl die just for a sad story. It's poverty porn and also complacency in a systemic issue.
He doesn't leave you there though. Something is done to save her. Something is done to help. She is given a future. And no one knows who did it except for Death. She is given hope.
And this is something that I've found to be a through line on many of Pratchett's works, hope.
Yes things are fucked up. Yes things are awful. But there is always hope. There is always something that can be done.
And in just turning up your nose at an issue and saying, oh dear, that's very sad, you fail to take action and continue on with the problem year after year after year.
There is hope if we act. And there is no greater gift than a future.
Pratchett militantly demanded that we care about each other. Even “those people.” This is evident especially in the Witches books, but shows across most, if not all, of his work.
And he often returned to the idea that “someone ought to do something” is rarely said by the person who intends to do actually do something
OP: "Grandpa made this for Dad when he was a child, and now it's been passed down to my son."
As pointed out in the comments on Douyin, a lot of thought went into the engineering: oval wheels slow it down, the frame is close to the ground and the handle is angled to prevent it from tipping over, the wood pieces on the back wheels lock it from moving in reverse, and the knocking sounds serve more than one purpose, both attracting the attention of the child as well as allowing the adults to easily hear the speed and location of the child.
Denialists force survivor’s group to shut down comments on socials
With hate crimes exploding in Canada in the last couple of years, Canada’s Senate has passed a bill that would criminalize more Nazis symbols, the noose and make it illegal to block people from attending places of worship. An amendment for Indigenous hatred was rejected before the final bill was approved.
Sen. Nancy Karetak-Lindell is Inuk from Canada’s northern territory of Nunavut and she brought the amendment to the senate floor.
She included the amendment: “making it a criminal offence to willfully promote hatred against Indigenous Peoples by condoning, denying or downplaying the Indian residential schools system.”
Well hot damn if it wasn't enough for this loser to throw a public tantrum now he's going out of his way to follow predestrogen on other platforms and start harassing her there!!! You can't hide these Matt I got the screenshots lol!!!!!!
HE'S BLATANTLY LYING OUT OF HIS ASS!! SPREAD IT AROUND!! And also since she seems to be from Ireland even though I don't even know shit about eu laws from what little I do know this is a big violation of GDPR and should be reported as such!! https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rights-citizens/redress/what-should-i-do-if-i-think-my-personal-data-protection-rights-havent-been-respected_en
hikes are very good yes but a deluxe hike is when you are a accompanied by a freak with niche nature knowledge. they’re like omg stop there’s a horned valerian varmint beetle here and then you both get to crouch down and look at a bug like :)
Yesterday was sick as fuck, I kissed three of my friends, started falling for a fourth, decided what I want to do with my life, got stopped in the street by a group of tourists to take my picture, got this dress for four bucks, it got me tipped 20 at the club while I was chatting with one of the dancers, and accidentally told my boyfriend I love him.
I'm done with wanting, things are ~going~ to be beautiful~<3
Perhaps this is an obnoxious take on my part, but video games should, above all things, prioritize the ability of being paused. At any point. Regardless of whether it's during a cutscene, a special animation, or a time-based puzzle. You never know when you're gonna get a phone call, or someone will need you in another room, or you get a sudden urge to go to the bathroom, or you hear your cat licking plastic, or whatever. Other entertainment mediums like books, movies, and music can be paused whenever you want. Why do some games not give you the same luxury??
By the way it's like. Really fucked how society's thoughts on epilepsy is just "get over it." Seizures can cause permanent brain damage. Seizures can kill people. Seizures hurt like hell. Allow me to reiterate that seizures can kill people. And you're just gonna casually put flashing lights, a common trigger for seizures in your advertisement, in your animation meme, in your edit, on your billboards, without even thinking about putting a simple disclaimer? That's unbelievable. Your little anime edit could deadass cost a life and you're not gonna put a warning because it's "inconvenient" or "people like that shouldn't be on the internet" (ableist) (the problem exists outside the internet also). Or you'll give insufficient ones like putting it in the captions or only giving like one second before the flashing lights appear, meaning that the trigger's already in motion before anyone who needs the warning can read it and save themselves from literal physical danger.
We need to start commenting under other people's posts about how to properly warn for flashing lights and eyestrain. We need to be emailing and calling companies about their possibly triggering advertisements that could induce seizures. We need to stop tolerating ableism and start speaking up for the more vulnerable.
Also, stop putting epilepsy warnings. That's like saying "warning: schizophrenia" on a post including unreality or "warning: dyslexia" on a post with a typing quirk. First off, the disability mentioned isn't the only group of people that this could trigger. Second, it doesn't truly get the message across and instead makes it worse for those with the disability-- scrolling through the epilepsy tag on Tumblr should get you to view the content of other epileptic people, but no, you just get a bunch of flashing lights and eyestrain, even though you could instead tag for, oh I dunno, flashing lights and eyestrain.
Anyways this Disability Pride, and for every month that comes after, think about epileptic people and others who are triggered by flashing lights/eyestrain. Happy pride to those who experience seizures too frequently due to the unaccommodating and ableist societies we live in!
