Confessions of a Caffeinated Mind

A collection of links from my wanderings about the web - mostly crafty, cooking, technological, or just interesting.

[figofswords]

Stuck.

(it’s 2am, and according to your therapist, you have “a whopping case of ADHD”

[hellenhighwater]

I see a lot of people who tell young people–especially young people who are heading into college–that they should “do what they love.” And they’re right. You should do what you love.

But there’s a world of difference between doing what you love for you, and doing what you love for a paycheck. 

I went to undergrad for graphic design and 3-D design–art and more art, I usually say–and I loved it. You know what I didn’t love? Trying to collect my fees from clients. Trying to meet unrealistic, over-simplified or over-specific briefs from people who didn’t know what they were talking about. Coming home, having worked creatively all day, with no creative juice left for the things I wanted to do.

You know what I would tell you instead? Do something that you can be interested in, with people you like.

You don’t have to love it. Loving your work can be a lot, and it often means you have to live in your job 24/7. Some people can do that. Not everyone can, or should.  But if you can find work that’s interesting enough that it doesn’t feel tedious, and people you can enjoy spending your 9-5 with, and you can make money, that’s great! It means you can do the things you love for you.

I’m in law school now. It’s interesting work, and difficult, and I like doing it. I like how complicated it gets, and I like the stories it tells. But I don’t come home and read law journals for fun. I come home, and I sculpt, and I draw, and I paint, and I read. I do these things for me.

And I love it. 

[shimmeringecho]

Gods I wish I’d had this ten years ago when everyone was pushing for me to do art for a living. Probably wouldn’t have burned out as hard as I did

[meijhen]

Things to tell my children!

[sosuperawesome]

Siadoma on Instagram

Follow So Super Awesome on Instagram

[everythingliar]

Twitter / Facebook / Patreon (real diary comic) / Instagram

[4-panel comic. June 29, 2019. Panel 1: There are books that want me to live. Panel 2: If I die, I can’t read them. Panel 3: So I should stay. Panel 4: I should stay.]

[sushigrade]

“A fox’s teeth are very sharp.” (2013-2019) Silk filament on silk-hemp blend with hand-dyed silk chiffon scarf.  Text is Sandman: The Dream Hunters by @neil-gaiman, design inspired by illustrations of Yoshitaka Amano.  Dress by L.L.K.  Photo credit to Kenneth Williams.

Six years ago, my unbelievably talented wife decided to undertake a ridiculously long and complicated project: to embroider a story onto a dress.

We live in a very casual college town where no one ever dresses up for anything, so we began a tradition of throwing formal New Year’s Eve parties, and L being L, she made a dress every year. In 2013, she decided to take it a step further: she would create a dress inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: The Dream Hunters and then embroider the entire story onto the dress. The dress itself was the work of a few weeks and looked beautiful on her at the party, and then the real work began: planning, mapping, embroidering and embroidering and embroidering. She estimated it would take approximately ten years of doing needlework an hour or two each evening, leaving plenty of time to take nights or even months off. She finished in under six.

I can’t summon words to describe how proud of her I am right now. I mean, I am always proud of her, as she is an exceptionally kind and caring human being as well as a polymath (seamstress, carpenter, baker, programmer, naturalist, and tenured professor of biology), but she has created a true work of art and I hope it ends up in a museum somewhere to immortalize her talent, skill, and patience.

She’s currently trying to figure out her next project.

[bookporn]

This is amazing! 😍

[rannulfr]

My gods this deserves more notes.

[naamahdarling]

This is one of the most extraordinary pieces of art I hsve ever seen. Absolutely beautiful.

[meijhen]

this is amazing, and if @neil-gaiman hasn't seen this, then he should!

[may09th]

some great articles and things i’ve read recently!

***I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America. by lauren hough

****An Epidemic of Disbelief by barbara bradley hagerty (about untested rape kits and police attitudes towards sexual assault) (sexual assault tw)

***How Do You Save Four Million Canadians From Hunger? by raizel robin

Neanderthals With Disabilities Survived Through Social Support by george dvorsky

I Lied When I Said We Did Everything We Could by lane wilson

Death in the Outback (australian aboriginal healthcare) by georgina kenyon

Stop this Madness: Schizophrenia in America by jonathon cohn

Vikings were never the pure-bred master race white supremacists like to portray by clare downham

How taming cows and horses sparked inequality across the ancient world by lizzie wade

Dear Therapist: I Don’t Talk to My Dad Anymore, but I’m Afraid to Tell My Family Why by lori gottlieb (sexual abuse tw)

***‘I Feel Pretty’ and the Rise of Beauty-Standard Denialism by amanda hess

How Arrival’s Designers Crafted a Mesmerizing Alien Alphabet by margaret rhodes

The Vertical Farm by ian frazier

***The Invisible City Beneath Paris by robert macfarlane

How Disney is Devouring Hollywood - And May Choke On It by adam b. vary

Judge Judy’s Lifetime Achievement Is Teaching Us to Laugh at the Less Fortunate by sarah jaffe

***The race to save a dying language (hawaiian sign language) by ross perlin

***What would cities look like if they were designed by mothers? by cristine murray

What ‘Good’ Dads Get Away With by darcy lockman

[cryptonature]

[honestlytoomuch]

Image description: tweet by The CryptoNaturalist which reads "when we die, they may bury us or collect our ashes, but remember this:from baby teeth to skin cells and everything in between, most matter that has worn your name is already spread throughout the world. We bury our remains in the soil of our lifetimes."

[intriga-hounds]

can i interest u in a box of friend??

[meijhen]

*squeee* fwend!!

[olearypoetry]

“Trying to convince myself I am allowed to take up space is like writing with my left hand when I was born to use my right.”

— Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey (via rupikaurpoems)

[catsbeaversandducks]

Please stop everything you’re doing and look at this baby peacock proudly showing his HUGE tail feathers.

Video by Hairy Farmpit Girls

[disgustinganimals]

Those are some aggressive looking pipe cleaners.

[naamahdarling]

He’s so perfect I’m CRYING

[meijhen]

the Hairy Farmpit Girls post the BEST stuff. And their soaps are pretty darn awesome too!

[doctorslippery]

[steinntroll]

INSTAGRAM  |  ETSY  |  FACEBOOK  |  DEVIANTART

Peacock Dragoness art doll

This doll designed and made by me fully from scratch. OOAK -  full reproduction of this design isn’t possible!

Sold.

Super sculpey, faux fur, feathers, wire+plastic armature, primer, acrylic paint, varnish. Posable neck and tail (wings and legs are narrow posable). 29 cm/ 11.5 inches tall.

[meijhen]

Wow wow wow!!!

[sapper-in-the-wire-old]

people today with access to more raw information than any other period: the earth is flat

german artilleryman in 1916, who barely washes his own ass: I need to account for the curvature and rotation of the earth when plotting my firing plans

[thefloatingstone]

Eratosthenes, an Egyptian, in 3750 BC when fucking mammoths hadn’t even gone extinct yet: Oh hey I can use these two obelisks to calculate the earth’s entire circumference based on the length of their shadows and the Earth’s curvature. Neat.

[alaija]

Erastothenes was born in 276 BCE.

The last mammoth died on in island off the northeast coast of Siberia in ~1650BCE.

And as I’ve pointed out previously, the Coriolis effect was known even earlier than that, although it may not have become important to gunnery.

[ultramaga]

I find it utterly bizarre that humans saw these megafauna.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/science/woolly-mammoth-extinct-genetics.html “ In fact, the Wrangel mammoth’s genome carried so many detrimental mutations that the population had suffered a “genomic meltdown,” according to Rebekah Rogers and Montgomery Slatkin of the University of California, Berkeley. Analyzing the Swedish team’s mammoth data at the gene level, they found that many genes had accumulated mutations that would have halted synthesis of proteins before they were complete, making the proteins useless, they report Thursday in PLOS Genetics. “ That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about - unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit - with incredibly damaged chromosomes. Sex exists for a reason, and no, “because it’s fun” is not the answer, sorry. It works better than reproduction otherwise. Which is why every complex species uses it. Intelligence requires a lot of things to be working correctly, and if you have an all female species that is over the tipping point of idiocy, then there won’t be enough people to maintain the technology to continue to reproduce. And humans will go the way of the Wrangel beasties. Fortunately, feminists are horribly lazy bastards, so i doubt they’ll continue to get their way, but it does made for a decent plot for a dystopian fiction…

[iron-sunrise]

What …the fuck?

[smitethestate]

That went off the rails so suddenly like I thought I was just gonna learn something cool about mammoths and then WHOA.

[kiwianaroha]

I scrolled past this thinking “the earth is round, yes, something, something, mammoths…’ 

But the second time it came past I saw 

That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal

And I think I got whiplash from that pivot. I also laughed so hard that I couldn’t breathe. 

[nyokoko]

I’m????

[prince-atom]

Point and laugh at the MRA, kids. 

[lyricwritesprose]

How … does he think … mammoths reproduced …

Never mind, not sure I want to know.

[sarkos]

reblog to support Mammoth Feminism,

ignore for G E N O M I C M E L T D O W N

[lankyguy]

I here af for my Feminist Mammoth ladies, bring the species back!

DOWN WITH GENOMIC MELTDOWN

[lavvyan]

I… what exactly is combining ovaries supposed to achieve? 400 lazy feminist babies at the same time?

[telesilla]

Shhhh…you weren’t supposed to tell anyone.

[curlicuecal]

FEMINISM KILLED THE MAMMOTHS

[butchflirt]

I feel like we’re getting away from the main point here, which is that the world is flat

[beepost-generator]

the world is only flat because it was trampled by feminist mammoths

[bigmammallama5]

reblog if you support your army of genetically-melted feminist mammoths that trampled the earth flat

[gotinterest]

Don’t anybody tell this guy about that species of lizard where there are only females it might break him

[systlin]

My head hurts after reading that. 

[solacekames]

I’m sending this post to @wehuntedthemammoth

[grison-in-labs]

Why would you hurt me like this?

That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about - unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit - with incredibly damaged chromosomes.

I teach genetics, I don’t deserve to have to explain why this is so wrong and yet. Oh my god. 

Mueller’s Ratchet–which is what this chucklefuck is talking about, the reason that purely asexual lineages don’t last well in evolutionary time–does not apply to feminism. The hypothetical scenario of merging two eggs to create a baby? Yeah, uh, that’s fucking sex in this context, whether or not it involves a male. 

There are zero feminists pushing for parthenogenesis for humans, mostly because the whole thing is basically impossible for mammals as a result of mammalian investment in genomic imprinting. Among other things. It’s the sort of thing that only works okay in species that don’t control their embryonic development anywhere near as closely as your basic placental mammal does, because it relies on a certain amount of flexibility about sex determination and placental mammals are kind of weird about that.

Even if there were, Mueller’s Ratchet only applies if you never ever sexually reproduce and reshuffle alleles, like the parthenogenetic whiptail lizards mentioned upthread. If we have the technology to induce parthenogenesis in a human woman, we have the technology to reshuffle some alleles now and again. Mueller’s Ratchet kind of presupposes that going in and manually editing a genome isn’t a fucking option, shitwad! 

Furthermore, Mueller’s Ratchet is specifically a population genetics phenomenon that refers to the accumulation of deleterious mutations within an asexually/clonally reproducing lineage. It has dick fuck all to do with chromosomes.

Mueller’s Ratchet exists in order to explain why asexually reproducing lineages haven’t overrun the world, because frankly in the short term these lineages usually do way better than their conspecific, obligate sexually reproducing partners do. Furthermore, it’s really fucking common to see species that reproduce sexually at some times and asexually at other times, depending on context and who’s available, and that’s in and of itself a complex fucking phenotype you species-centric cortically starved ignorant dillweed

all of this is completely fucking irrelevant to the mammoth example that @brett-caton there chose to bring up, by the way, because mammoths don’t fucking reproduce asexually either 

as you would know if you’d bothered to read the paper, you self-satisfied jellyfish fellator

or even the pop science article you cited yourself 

which clearly and cogently explains that the fucking mammoths died of being inbred as all shit, much like yourself

the laziness inherent in jumbling all this pig-ignorant, overconfident and understudied bullshit together and claiming it’s a solidly built house rather than a crumbling, confused pile of enraged starfish is the final straw

you can’t even be arsed to read an article that you dug up and cited yourself, you shithugger

how are feminists supposed to be the lazy ones? 

you obviate your own thesis with your own intellectual failure, you pathetic snailsucking weed in the garden of knowledge

[nineprotons]

I reblogged this before but I have to do so again because of the above takedown with its glorious insults. Also, it’s always fun to point and laugh at MRAs.

[trash-supernova]

I am in awe.

[puttingtheassinassassin]

“Mueller’s Ratchet kind of presupposes that going in and manually editing a genome isn’t a fucking option, shitwad!” and “you pathetic snailsucking weed in the garden of knowledge” are honestly awe-inspiring and I’m fucking blessed I read them today

[thattimberwolfkid-blog]

This is beautiful

[scots-dragon]

It’s been long enough since I last saw this post that I’d nearly forgotten and it still fucking hit me like a goddamn freight train.

[deliriumcrow]

You self-satisfied jellyfish fellator, you pathetic snailsucking weed in the garden of knowledge

Fucking poetry there, Shakespeare would be hard pressed to improve upon these lines.

[naamahdarling]

@shitpostsampler The snailsucking jellyfish fellator quote is golden.

[meijhen]

so much gold and also wtf-ery here

[toadschooled]

I release you, meaty woman

[meijhen]

I miss these guys. they used to be everywhere in the spring and summer, and now they have mostly disappeared, like the fireflies.

[scottlynch78]

Although a cat was definitely trying to help me take this photo, it did not end up being a photo of a cat.

[meijhen]

Squuuueewwwwwweeeeeee!!!!*@&#^#%@&#

[galina]

Do you keep a commonplace book? It’s not entirely a journal or a scrapbook – it’s more a carefully curated notebook compiled of texts copied from anywhere and everywhere. It can contain anything as long as it affects the compiler. I’ve had this one since I was 16, it is reserved for my most favourite lines from poems, books, songs, films, etc.

[meijhen]

I need to start one of these

[linneart]

Excuse me while I just draw Ronan Lynch until Call Down the Hawk comes out