KactusNZ @kactusnz - Tumblr Blog

this is what is happening between us when i like your vent post

you have to understand that my body does not work by default. “ohhh so many medications means so many chemicals inside you. i could never” well if i did not take these things i would not be able to function. i respect and have made peace with the chemical. Get out of my face

moniquill

This but also: dearest (Temporarily) Abled Person do you think that you don't have 'so many chemicals' inside you?? That yours are somehow 'less chemical' because your body made them?

Example: I take pills to change the chemicals in my brainmeats to have a serotonin and dopamine profile that's more like yours, Abled person.

ratbastarddotfuck

We need to start seriously treating the concepts of "obesity" and "weight loss" as a dangerous pseudoscience and I'm not kidding.

It's some shit that everyone thinks they can understand based on vibes but science just doesn't work that way. Real scientists have proved time and time again that it doesn't work how people assume. Many medical conditions where it's assumed weight is a "cause", something to blame the patient for, it's often actually a symptom.

Body size is based on so many individual possibilities. genetics, upbringing, wealth, what type of food you eat, what type of work you do, where you live, etc etc etc. it is impossible to control for all of these.

I was a child born to fat, impoverished, labourer parents, and I grew up doing farm labour, gaining muscle - I will never ever be thin. It's just how my body developed. And no matter how much weight I were to hypothetically lose, doctors would still push me to lose more. Family would push me to lose more. Society would push me to lose more. It will never ever ever be enough. You will never be thin enough, there is no bmi low enough to satisfy them, there is no "progress" that won't just make them pity or shame you even more. Your personal circumstances aren't important to a pseudo-scientific practice, the variables don't matter that much, it must be a one-size-fits-all solution.

Every weight loss pill, every low calorie shake or meal replacement, every weight watchers frozen meal, it all contributes to the pseudo-scientific cult of thinness. Every ad that says you're not good enough, it pushes you to drop your critical thinking skills. We have created a world where people think shitting themselves into thinness using potions with untested ingredients is healthier than having some fat on their bodies. But it's not! That's absurd! You're sending your body into a constant state of gastric shock!! And one day, when you get bored of eating tasteless nutrient paste and decide to eat something with some flavour in it, your body will react with a starvation response and store every little bit of fat that it can, because it's so used to being fucking starved. Which sends people into a panic response, buying up more pills and trying to crash-diet and lose their meagre protective layers.

Your body stores fat because that's your reserve energy. Fat is protective. I thank my body every day for storing so much energy for me, fuck knows I need it! That's your blubber!! You are a large mammal. Your body is designed to keep energy in reserve so you can sleep and stay warm and keep your brain alive. You should research the human metabolic process. You should research the cow metabolic process. You should research bear metabolic process. YOU NEED FAT!

And just like so many other pseudosciences, fatphobia and all that it entails is deeply rooted in racism and specifically antiblackness. It is not a mistake that the ozempic-chic era is coinciding with one of the biggest waves of open, globalised white supremacy we've seen in decades. Whiteness needs to perform & police whiteness constantly, maintaining appearances is THE way to stay part of the ingroup.

You must commit to removing yourself from that ingroup. Do not allow it a single toe in the door. A pseudoscience, no matter how comforting and easy to digest it may be, is not your friend. It is feeding you lie upon lie upon lie.

ismenes

you know those studies showing that cursing helps with pain tolerance or whatever. that’s how i feel about making my weird little noises to get through my basic daily activities. sometimes you just have to go hggblaaaah for a minute so you can find the strength within yourself to get up or wash the dishes or send an email. mmmnneh. urgh. the torments are unending but you can always make some little sounds about it.

was-once-somewhere-else

I just saw a video title on YouTube that said something like “Why is glass transparent?” And that’s an interesting question and I’m sure it’s great that the video exists but my first thought was like “Because glass is terrible, obviously.” Because it’s unwieldy and let’s out warmth and needs to be heated to hundreds of degrees to be shaped and turns into hundreds of tiny daggers if you drop it. Why the hell would we bother with that if it didn’t have some magical quality like being totally transparent despite being solid? Glass is transparent because if it weren’t, we’d use something else.

was-once-somewhere-else

looking through my “me” tag and this is apparently what I was thinking 3 years ago

totally-a-wizard

If you’re still curious we did not start working glass for its transparency. It was most likely started as a sanitary concern. Glass is easy to clean with soap and water, once it’s cleaned out you can use it again for anything and no germs or flavor from the previous meal or drink will remain.

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it. That would leak out seemingly at random no less. Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness. Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation. Also beads. Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.

The fact that it could become see through was a side benefit.

was-once-somewhere-else

this is amazing and I’m really glad I reblogged that old bullshit post because I got to learn this

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.

ms-demeanor

None of these are poisonous to drink from or meaningfully radioactive, btw, but they will leech heavy metals into things stored in them the way that leaded crystal will.

niidsch

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky ☆ 2009

homunculus-argument

You're in his dms I'm on his nerves

oldinterneticons

heyfruitcake

Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i

ignitelimelight

They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government

hometoursandotherstuff

Came across this art installation, Liza Lou's Kitchen, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. It's a kitchen made of tiny glass beads, that artist Liza Lou did, taking 5 yrs. to complete, from 1991 - 1996.

My favorite part is the sink.

beekeeperspicnic

My comic from @very-sincerely-yours-zine !

This was a lovely little thing to hop into after finishing last Summer after The Beekeeper's Picnic.

I spent a while debating whether Mycroft Holmes is a jam first or a cream first kind of scone eater.

fuckyeahchinesefashion

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

Split-joint seals (骑缝章qifengzhang)are still widely used on important paper documents in modern China, an anti-tampering technique passed down from ancient times. They are applied across the edge of multi-page contracts, bidding documents and official archives. If any page is removed or replaced, the broken seal pattern can prove the file has been altered.

ariaste

OMG I got so excited about this because they used a really similar (though far less refined) version of this for contracts in the European medieval period!

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

Delights me when human beings find similar ways to solve the same problem at two different ends of the world. <3

itsfullofstars

ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE DAY July 14, 2026 at 05:00PM Is there an angry Sith using force lightning in the Tatacoa Desert? This is not science fiction, but a red sprite with multiple streamers! Ordinary lightning occurs when thundercloud particles collide, lose their electrons, and build up negative charge at the cloud bottom. The cloud’s negative charge repels negative charge deeper into the Earth, leaving Earth’s surface positively charged. The opposite charges attract, reaching towards each other and superheating the air into a white strike of plasma. Red sprites are millisecond events triggered by positive cloud-to-ground lightning. They extend up into the mesosphere where the air is too thin for thunder. Their red glow comes from heated molecular nitrogen. There are several potential causes for red sprites, including that the preceding positive lightning exposes the negatively charged cloud core to the positively charged upper atmosphere, allowing those charges to connect. NASA’s Juno has observed sprites on Jupiter, indicating that sprites occur on other planets! Image: https://ift.tt/zPb2w6Q via NASA https://ift.tt/qURxdfC APOD --> https://ift.tt/nq5hG7R

makingtrouble

It's my cat's birthday (anniversary of me getting him) so I told him the story of his life while petting him real good

Highlights include:

For your first two years (when you were small) you lived in a foster home with people who raised you into a very polite young man. Two is like you plus me, that's what two is.

Some people adopted you before me and they called you Timmy (which is a stupid name) and they returned your ass almost immediately because you were so annoying at that age.

Like think about how annoying you are right now at seven years old, but way worse.

I'm better than them though, I don't call you Timmy and I wore earplugs to bed for three years because you love to scream at bedtime. Earplugs are like when I roll over and go back to sleep even when you are yelling so so so loud.

I got you at a time in my life when I was really sick (being sick is like when I'm up late because I'm throwing up and you are a very handsome good boy who sits with me) and they had to put me asleep for a procedure. A procedure is like what happened to you when they put you asleep and took your balls away.

Now you've lived with me for five years. Five is like the number of toe beans on one of your feet. When I clip your nails five is when we're halfway done. But we're hopefully not even halfway done with how long we get to be together. I'm gonna have to figure out new ways to help you count.

makingtrouble

Actually I've decided this is a poem