Where will you wander? Hither and yonder.

Elpunt • late 20s • UK • she/her

[gayvampyr]

important things happening in r/cats

[coredrill]

something that i DO find fascinating abt both phm and interpretations of it is when folks say things along the lines of “the point of grace’s lack of attachments isn’t that he’s aroace, the point of grace’s lack of attachments is that he’s refused to open himself up enough to form ANY close bonds because he’s a coward” because like. not only is it very possible for both to be true, i think that reading both as being the case continues to enhance the story AND speaks a very honest truth about how being aroace might have affected his life?

like. imagine you are grace. you have a life you enjoy where you get to teach kids you’re fond of about a subject you love. you’ve been hanging out with your friend marissa weekly for years (!) and you have a lot of peers on project hail mary who you respect and even have fun with. but! you’re also like 40, and you know how the world works - at the end of the day, at the end of the project, all of those people will go back to their parents and families and partners. the people whose names are on their emergency contact forms and birth certificates and marriage licenses and apartment leases. no matter how much you care about them, and no matter how much they care about you, there is always someone else in their life who is Above you, and Before you, because That’s How The World Works.

so like… yeah. lmao. aroace grace not opening himself up all the way because he anticipates pain and wants to avoid that is a kind of protective hedging that i find very likely for him to engage in? even if he opens himself up to the people around him, the fact is that most of those people will only reciprocate to whatever degree they/society deem acceptable for friendship, even if they like him a lot.

which is why, imo, the very careful portrayal of grace and rocky’s friendship in the phm film reads as extremely aroace-coded. because it’s not “rocky specifically is Special and Likable in a way which fixes all of grace’s hangups and allows him to open up” - it’s “rocky has a partner to go home to, but on multiple occasions, puts grace Above and Before that in a way which grace is unused to, because grace comes from a society which culturally and legally devalues the types of relationships he wants and holds most dear.” and once rocky shows that he is willing to reciprocate friendship and care to a degree grace could never expect from anyone on earth, grace no longer needs to maintain the kind of emotional defenses he always has. grace likes rocky and wants to be friends from the moment they meet, of course, but only lets himself form SUCH a close bond after rocky demonstrates that he, too, does not place an earth-society-style limit on the strength of their friendship. and they’re both better off for it!

[theuglymachine]

I was commissioned to make a spearhead in the shape of a great egret

[siffrin-of-the-day]

Can we please have A Siffrin

STEALING

STEALING THINGS! TAKING THINGS THAT DO NOT BELONG TO THEM!

Day 252 Frin: Sneaky little rogue!

[intriga-hounds]

No one’s doin it like this guy

[intriga-hounds]

Bazzy and Ponzu celebrate arrival of Friends

[miinobobeano]

It bothers me so much that the healthcare system relies so much on the patient's ability to advocate for themselves, organize their history, and be so persistent against every medical “professional” who says there’s nothing wrong/they can do. But so many struggle with fatigue, brain fog, and face such ingrained systemic barriers, that the people who need and deserve help and support can’t access it.

I saw something recently that resonated with me: “Access shouldn't depend on who has the energy to fight for it.” And I’ve never agreed with anything more.

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[ahedderick]

This is the most beautiful scientific diagram I've ever seen.

Also a great example of why pink is a tint of red, but also a completely different color. Erbium? Neodymium? So beautiful.

[ms-demeanor]

FYI Neodymium glass (aka Alexandrite glass to collectors) appears different colors under different lights:

This image is from a great writeup of why that happens on the Jennii Neutron blog.

[ms-demeanor]

Oh and of course Uranium, Selenium, Manganese, and Cadmium all fluoresce under black light.

[creekfiend]

help. the suspenders slipping off his shoulders are giving Boudoir Shoot

[kuttithevangu]

I need all the hyperlexic statistical outliers on tumblr to look up what’s meant by low literacy, it means like, can’t read the notice from the electric company that says they’re cutting you off. Can’t read your doctor’s instructions on how to treat yourself at home. It means “school system failed you so badly that it might kill you”, if you’re reading simple fiction for fun you are already so far out of the window of maximum concern

[letmefixthatforyou]

Okay but can we stop using hyperlexic to mean "has a large vocabulary" or "knows how to read really well"?

Hyperlexia is a real condition that makes people more likely to have a low literacy level because it's defined by being able to read words without comprehending what they're reading.

[kuttithevangu]

I’m hyperlexic and I used that term in that post because I recognize the pattern of people who know how to read every word but have a very hard time understanding the (especially social) meaning of the gestalt

[augustellar]

(Prompt submission) Grace's Eridian doctors are large animal veterinarians. There are some awkward adjustment periods.

THIS 🤣🤣 imagining the absolutely bonkers kinds of eridians that must have been yoinked from their jobs to suddenly be in charge of keeping the FIRST SAPIENT ALIEN EVER alive brings me cackling-maniacally levels of glee. yes, please tell me more about the eridian lab tech who does the boring, monotonous cataloguing of bacterial glycosyltransferase enzymes suddenly having their space phone BLOWING UP. random eridian who's job is just. feeding and wrestling the big terrestrial predators at the zoo into taking their meds is suddenly missing from work, later found to be kidnapped and taken to Eridian WHO headquarters with new job of putting pills in peanut butter for rocky's new alien pal. thank you thank you!

[normal-creature]

op your tags pass peer review

[hateusandseeifwemind]

[pinene]

Can anyone explain wtf is going on here especially a Korean speaker

[tadeadshihamurder]

someone on reddit explained 😭

[no-one-offical]

‎

[desmolbean404]

That is one of the most astronomical fuck up translations I have ever seen.

[teaboot]

Remember! When companies lay off all their staff because AI is cheaper, this sort of shit is what you can leverage for a better contract when they are inevitably forced to hire everyone back :)

[voidcreations]

Look at my birthday cake...

[psychic-waffles]

We're at the "JK Rowling is personally funding litigation to try and destroy AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL" stage of rabid UK terf brain.

Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky

Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*

You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.

*Not so friendly reminder there is no way to engage in the wizard books without enabling this shit.

[elpuntthing]

so how DOES grace manage to subsist on a taumoeba diet while keeping the ship sterile of taumoeba?

[starrose17]

Because he doesn't start eating the taumeba until hes already on Erid. Grace starving and eating taumeba on the journey there is fanon, in canon he has enough food left to last him the journey, only a few months after arriving on Erid does he run out. He then eats the taumeba and suffers illness after illness, including scurvy, before the Eridians invent a sort of multivitamin shake, then eventually clone his own cells to create meat he can eat. A me-burger, as he calls them.

[elpuntthing]

so how DOES grace manage to subsist on a taumoeba diet while keeping the ship sterile of taumoeba?