'Witch ' by Valera Lutfullina
occasionally subtle
I'd rather be in outer space đ¸
$LAYYYTER
noise dept.

Origami Around
Sweet Seals For You, Always
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Aqua Utopiaď˝ćľˇăŽĺşă§č¨ćśăç´Ąă

Kiana Khansmith
Jules of Nature
Xuebing Du
Monterey Bay Aquarium

if i look back, i am lost
Today's Document
Three Goblin Art
AnasAbdin

#extradirty
DEAR READER
cherry valley forever
sheepfilms
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seen from Syria
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seen from Italy
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seen from Morocco
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@letunreasonreign
'Witch ' by Valera Lutfullina
I hear the hush of mighty wings, I see shadows gliding across the hills
Something that gets really lost in a lot of discourse is that what we would now call 'going low-contact' or 'going no-contact' with your family used to be so completely within the normal range of familial contact that there wasn't even a term for it. Sure, in the pre-IM pre-social media days some people were calling their parents daily, but I'd wager the vast majority of people were not. Long distance calling used to be quite expensive, after all. If your kid went to the big city to seek their fortune you might hear from them every few weeks, or every month, or once a year, and that wasn't particularly odd. This was even more the case before telephones were common, of course - people would send letters, but definitely not more than once a week and probably a lot less. It was just a normal, accepted fact that you'd hear from some family members who lived nearby often, and some who lived farther away very rarely.
The minimum amount of contact with family that is expected of people in the groupchat-facetime-instagram era is so much higher than at any previous point in history. The ceiling is about the same, since then and now multiple generations often live under the same roof, but the floor is higher by orders of magnitude.
How many adult children who are 'no-contact' or 'low-contact' now would also have been the ones who moved to the city and sent a letter every three months then? Is family estrangement an actual current problem, or is it just an illusion caused by smartphones?
When I complain about increased surveillance, control, and infantilization of older kids and young adults, it's often a level of surveillance and control that wouldn't have been possible, or at least practical, in previous generations. At minimum, it would've been escapable.
check out the mourning dovesâ new single âhooOOOO hoo hoo hooâ if you get the chance. sound of the summer.
I recorded the frogs in and around my backyard last night. It's been warm and wet, and they're very happy. I even managed to edit out most of the car sounds.
This is an anti-despair checkpoint! You must share something you're looking forward to before scrolling on.
Janis Joplin, Schenectady 1970.
Art by Gary Butts.
puttering around the house is an underrated form a self-care. make some tea or coffee. put on a podcast. sort the mail. tidy some pillows and fold some blankets. start the laundry. thaw some soup. just casually wander around aimlessly doing little things to make your space and life a little nicer. who cares if you get distracted or only do a little. you aren't being productive. you're puttering.
"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 whalesâthe second-largest animals after blue whalesâmake extremely low-pitched calls that can be heard across entire oceans. It nearly destroyed Payneâs 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 Hzâan 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 theyâre mostly inaudible to us unless theyâre 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 âmay be in tenuous acoustic contact throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.â 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. âWhen you get to distances like that, people just refuse to believe that itâs true,â Payne tells me.
Payneâs 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, Payneâs 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 spectrogramsâvisual representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked upâClark 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. âI just thought: Roger was right,â he says. âIt is physically possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean basin.â (...)
Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. Itâs possible that theyâre 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. âThatâs not arbitrary,â 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, youâd come up with something similar to a blue whaleâs 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. âI could illuminate the ocean,â 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 beelineâa whaleline?âfor tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. âWhen you watch these animals move, itâs as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,â 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 mindâs ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. âThey said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if Iâm near Labrador or off the Bay of Biscay,â says Clark. âI thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years?â
The scale of a whaleâs hearing is hard to grapple with. Thereâs 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, itâs 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 whaleâs 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, âyou have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,â Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASAâs spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.
Whales werenât 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 themâthe filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacksâshifted 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 arenât 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 soâthe 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
I've been using this tool called tumblr-utils to back up my tumblr blogs. it creates a locally navigatable archive of a given tumblr url's posts, which is more convenient than the post soup you get from tumblr's native blog export feature.
what that means is that I have a folder on my computer with the name of my url with an index.html file in it, and when i click on that file to open it in a browser I get a simple page with a list of years and months. selecting a specific month will send me to a list of the posts i made or reblogged in that month, similar to tumblr's own archive page. the contents of the post including images are stored locally on your machine.
It can also make a separate index file that organises posts by tag, which is great if you're a consistent tagger, but it will list every single tag you've ever used so it can take a while to find the tag you're looking for in the list if you're a habitual tag commentator. generating the tag archive also takes a while depending on how many posts have to be processed.
you can make it back up any blog as long as it's not set to private. I have backups of both my main and sideblogs and it keeps them in separate folders.
it's had some trouble going all the way back to the start of my main blog in 2012 just by sheer volume of posts, but by making it fetch posts from one month at a time I've been able to go back to 2015 (that's tens of thousands of posts), which was good enough for my purposes.
it might be a little scary to use if you've never touched the command line before, but there's both text and video instructions to set it up and using it is just a matter of typing the command and letting it do its thing in the background.
This document has a really good guide for setting it up, along with some other options for backup. I've been using tumblr utils for a while myself, and I run an incremental backup once a week.
'The Frogs' Concert'. Illustration for Liliana by Apel-les Mestres, 1905.
Opening illustration from A Book of Satyrs (1907), Austin Osman Spare.
Vultures are holy creatures. Tending the dead. Bowing low. Bared head. Whispers to cold flesh, âYour old name is not your king. I rename you âEverything.ââ
- Jarod K. Anderson @cryptonature
'The Little People of the Garden ' by Ruth O. Dyer, illustrated by L. J. Bridgman, 1922.