Title goes here @fate-374 - Tumblr Blog

one of the most fucked up aspects of being an adult is really how life-goes-on everything is. like you can be dealing with the most fucked up trauma-drama-grief and still have to sleep and eat food to survive and like. poop. pooping while you're really sad shouldn't be a thing but it is. we don't have a say in the matter. life goes on

redstonedust

i think its fine to have limited tastes in media if you understand your limitations. like i wont shame someone if they only watch cartoons because thats their choice but i also dont think you can go making hot takes about the horror genre if the scariest thing youve watched this decade was the owl house finale. that seems ill advised.

ruhaniya

"you should be at the club" i should be by the sea. i should be in the mountains. i should be at the moon. i should be awestruck and rendered speechless by the majesty of the natural world. if you even care.

chasingrainbowsforever

“On the Brink of Extinction (Amur Leopard)” ~ By bigcatphotos

derinthescarletpescatarian

When you ask a tradie how the job's going and they say "getting there" in that flat tone that implies that they fucking hate your house

derinthescarletpescatarian

They do love how accessible all my pipes and things are though. Every tradie who I've shown the underside of my house has been very impressed with how much space they have to work in under there.

silly-jellyghoty

This is such a wild concept for me tbh. What do you mean by the "underside of my house"? What do you mean by the "space to work under there"? Do you have your house suspended by balloons like that old man from Up? Why is your building not sitting upon a solid concrete slab like a proper building should? Do you like having animals living under your floor? Wild. Absolutely wild.

derinthescarletpescatarian

Sorry for being one of the vast majority of currently living humans not living in a modern house in a completely flat suburb at ground level. I'll try to do better next time. God forbid people live on shores, flood-risk areas, or (in my case) steep hills that aren't worth levelling with explosives and construction equipment just to put some houses there. I should have lived somewhere else where I could have a "proper building". The Animals will move in under the house any day now, and I will be at their mercy.

becauseforoncethisisme

Those houses are cool as fuck and also ngl I was imagining people tunneling under to the foundation for Reasons and thought “huh, okay, didn’t know repairmen needed to do that” and evidently they do not! It is an entirely different thing than I imagined! I am one of today’s lucky ten thousand!

derinthescarletpescatarian

I imagine that *under* the foundation would be the worst place to put pipes and wires -- both unprotected and inaccessible.

forcekenobi

as a child being told "the moon controls the tides" with no additional explanation was like. oh okay. you want me to believe in magic? you're talking about magic right now? okay. fine

forcekenobi

sorry. only semi-related but i simply wasn't ready for "the sun is a distant gorilla". thank you NASA

hyperchaotix

icarus-suraki

cutecipher

science has always been political. what gets studied. what doesnt. who gets to do the studying. on and on and on.

cutecipher

scientists on this post: yuuuup 👍

people who aren't scientists: um actually ☝️

should-be-sleeping

Everyone please behold this baby tree:

It's so much smaller than the support posts, they had to secure it with caution tape.

should-be-sleeping

Caution: baby!

should-be-sleeping

One day (but not this day)!

should-be-sleeping

Update:

Thriving!

should-be-sleeping

Now taller than a human person!

In case you were wondering!

should-be-sleeping

Update:

Filling out, and up!

should-be-sleeping

We threw it a birthday party once spring arrived. 🎂

should-be-sleeping

🎉

lee-alder

Today was a pretty shit day. This is a nice post to see. Birthday hat tree.

should-be-sleeping

I hope tomorrow is kinder. 🌱

should-be-sleeping

You can. You will! 🏞

daysleftofsecondterm

You will make it. Just like baby tree. You HAVE to believe that.

bluerain3-deactivated20230129

dollsonmain

darthmaulscatgirl

i love how this works no matter the result

dinovelvet

sharkinablanket

thefoolishkat

and they are the bestest of friends

trve-grimdark

anxietyproblem

queeraang

fascinating thing about sinners is how absolutely doomed the narrative is.

like okay if sammie hadn't gone to the juke joint, remmick probably wouldn't have shown up. but then the klan would have. okay smoke took those assholes out solo, if it was him and stack maybe they could have handled it. well the juke joint would have shut down in a month because no one had any real fucking money because of the sharecropping scrip. not to mention two seperate mobs are on their way to fuck the twins up (what do you MEAN you robbed al capone??). okay maybe they covered their tracks, well they're still in the fucking jim crow south and stack and mary have a cool 35 years until loving v virginia so best case scenario is he's broke and watching the love of his life from afar until he's 70. plus annie implied the twins were on borrowed time anyway since she'd been quietly protecting them the whole time they were gone.

idk it both adds to the horror that there was no way out and just solidifies sammie saying it was the best day of his life, like that one little perfect moment was all they were going to get anyway

thestarlightforge

Bless your tags OP ❤️

serps-up

so happy and free

reachartwork

this is going to be a silly reblog but i have kind of a fixation on animal qualia and the idea of an animal's umwelt, so i ended up wondering whether pudding was actually "enjoying" this.

which meant i went and read about snail brains.

here's the bad news, at least by human standards:

snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.

pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.

snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."

so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.

and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.

snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."

if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.

pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.

i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.

snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?

so maybe the point isn't "this is sad because he can't enjoy it," but "this is a reminder that minds come in radically different shapes, and value doesn't have to be rich to be real."