the acolouthic hedgehog

the zandra: lawyer, violinist, writer, reader, big sister, cookie baker, tea drinker, bunny cuddler

[notjusthespongenextdoor]

I'm coming to realize how vital it is to keep a running list of shit you did in the past few weeks so that you can participate in small talk. It's literally not anything to do with them being interesting at all it's just having Something to say to give people even the barest thing to hold on to. It's so you don't get into the "what have you been up to" "nothing much what about you" "yeah same" trap. Literally just say something.

What have you been up to? Um well it's getting warmer so I've been having to brush my cat every day.

Like no it's not that interesting of a thing to say. But now they can respond to it. They could say, man yeah it really is heating up, I've been trying to think of things to do inside more often. Or, oh you have a cat? What's their name?

Like. It's Something. All you need is Something. And if you're like me and your brain immediately goes blank upon entering small talk then keeping a list will help you remember things to say.

[wizard-council-bureaucrat]

Everybody STOP having a crisis, it’s now tea time

☕️☕️☕️🫖🍵🍵🍪

Pause all dread an catastrophe to have a cuppa and some cookies for the next 15-30 minutes

This is a wizard spell

[vulcartist]

I translated the Ea-Nasir complaint into vulcan and engraved it in on a cooper plate

[tournevis-real]

The tumblrest sentence I have ever seen

[captain-price-returns]

[hackfurs]

General tumblr reminder, since some people don't know: If the person's URL has "deactivated" plus a string of numbers (a date) after it, that means that they manually deleted their own blog. It doesn't mean they were banned. Banned blogs don't have "deactivated" after them and will just be the normal URL you can't click on or interact with. They look very similar and function the same, but they were caused by two very different things.

[hackfurs]

thats not true i dont think people would do that

[setulose]

Not to sound like a broken record but does it make anyone else viscerally angry how we realized in the very recent past that we can successfully eradicate devastating human-specific diseases (smallpox) yet now there's a million people telling you not to vaccinate your kids against measles. I know I know "everyone will not just" but also for real we could never have measles again if everyone would just be cool

[offonaherosjourney]

Suddenly got hit with the concept plus a very detailed visual of Moist von Lipwig donning his famous Postmaster General suit via magical girl transformation. And now I am supposed to go about my day? As if I hadn't just experienced what I can only describe as a divine vision??

[tellybox]

Good news, our deliverance is at hand!

(Deliverance, gettit? Hilarious, I know)

I also posted all of these in response to an ask here, but this version has some edits made to it so is by all accounts superior

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: The carp leaping over the dragon gate 鲤鱼跃龙门 is a classic Chinese folk symbol. It stands for people overcoming hardships to achieve success. We often use it to wish others a bright future and smooth progress. If you spot a carp leaping over the Dragon Gate, good luck will come your way.

[a-silly-poll-side-blog-yay]

the last food you ate is your nickname now how is it going

good

bad

great

awful

results

Remaining time: 20 hours 59 minutes

[darlingofdots]

people who definitely know that Hollander and/or Rozanov have A Thing With A Man (of variably certain identity):

various dentists

hotel housekeeping staff

the kid who works late shifts at the drugstore where Ilya buys condoms (often) and lube (less often)

cleaners and laundry service employees

a kid on vacation with his parents in Vegas bored out of his mind because he's 14 and not allowed in the bars or casinos at their hotel and he's really hitting the grumpy teenager phase so he's pissed at his parents because he wanted to go birdwatching in the desert and instead he's on the hotel roof at night pointing his sick-ass binoculars (which he bought himself with money he earned by mowing their neighbours' lawns for a year) at the surrounding buildings and oh look there's two people making out on that rooftop terrace—wait, isn't that the guy from the Rolex ads?

Janice at the grocery store closest to the Hollander cottages who knows damn well that "David's boy" doesn't eat Nutella

the Voyageurs' nutritionist knows Hollander is fucking someone working for the Bears because he might not log it as sex but even Hollander doesn't actually do extra cardio after a game

employee at an airport phone repair kiosk in Chicago who was checking Ilya’s battery specs when "Jane" texted him "If I win you suck my dick first"

one of the parents at Game Changers Hockey Camp who is a couple's counsellor and a bit too good at her job

Gerry (78) three doors down from the Hollanders who has lived in his house since he was born and has made it his solemn duty to know everything that goes on in his neighbourhood

the owner of the bespoke jeweller's shop once Shane Hollander purchases the second ring, which is identical to the first, and a plain gold chain

the apprentice of the bespoke jeweller's shop a week before that when he recognises the ring he watched his boss make for Shane Hollander sitting on Ilya Rozanov's bare chest in a post-game interview on TV

[ph-cutie]

[bite-my-grimy-fleshy-ass]

If You Like a Long Island, Wait Until You Try the Adios, Motherfucker

If you like a Long Island Iced Tea, wait until you try the provocatively named Adios, Motherfucker. It’s fun, boozy and blue.

Found a recipe for it that's worded like electrochemistry wrote it

[bite-my-grimy-fleshy-ass]

Update: this tastes like if a baha blast could kill you and annihilates any ongoing anxiety attacks

[bite-my-grimy-fleshy-ass]

Update update: comparing this to a long island is like comparing a pickup truck to a tank

[bokuwaboku-datte]

Eridians must be absolutely amazed that Grace can be woken up before his sleep cycle is finished. They take advantage of this and fit the biodome's bedroom with a remotely-triggered alarm system, so if something ever goes wrong with the life support systems while Grace is asleep, they can wake him up and have him move to safety. But, being that their sleep is more like a deep dormancy, they WAY overestimate what it takes to forcibly wake someone up.

The first time they have to use it (over something stupid like a tiny ammonia leak), Grace wakes up to like three different foghorns and a hundred camera flashes going off at once and is like HOLY GEEZ THE APOCALYPSE IS UPON US

(eta if someone with art talent wants to make this a proper eridian welcoming committee comic please do!)

[goodieprocter]

RIP Rocky’s project

Bonus:

And here’s my reference:

[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.

L'Odissea di Nolan tra "scheletri spazzatura" e relitti: Arpa al lavoro in Sicilia, che succede

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

[whumpster-fire]

Just reread Fugitive Telemetry and upon a reread I think Murderbot is a tiny bit misinterpreting Senior Officer Indah's behavior towards it. Murderbot thinks it's because it's a SecUnit, which is obviously not wrong, but I think there's another facet of this which isn't on Murderbot's radar: once Indah starts thinking of it as a person, she's probably thinking of it as This Arrogant Asshole From the Corporation Rim who thinks Preservation Security are a bunch of incompetent hippies, tells them how to do their jobs and keeps complaining about them not having the dystopian levels of mass surveillance that it's come to expect from working in the CR, and is upset that they said no to giving it access to a bunch of data that violates privacy laws.

I can see how, from the perspective of a cop who has grown up in Preservation culture, this must be incredibly annoying, and means even setting aside any prejudices over a SecUnit being a deadly weapon, it kind of comes across to Indah as someone who she can't trust to follow basic standards of professional ethics if it thinks it knows better.

And Murderbot doesn't really consider this as a possibility because it's not used to being seen as a person at all, let alone seen as one by the Corporation Rim, so the idea that someone else would see it as a Corporate Person just never crosses its mind.

[jezunya]

Yessss, this is especially clear in this exchange:

[ID: two photos of a passage from Fugitive Telemetry that read:

"Yes, I've had experience with investigating suspicious fatalities in controlled circumstances."

Indah's gaze wasn't exactly skeptical. "What controlled circumstances?"

I said, "Isolated work installations."

Her expression turned even more grim. "Corporate slave labor camps."

I said, "Yes, but if we call them that, Marketing and Branding gets angry and we get a power surge through our brains that fries little pieces of our neural tissue."

Indah winced. Mensah folded her arms, her expression a combo of "are you satisfied now" and "get on with it."

End ID]

Indah absolutely is looking at MB as a snobby Corporate Person, with the way she sneers out 'corporate slave labor camps,' like MB was intentionally sugar-coating the reality of CR slave labor camps, as if it and any other SecUnits were the ones making the decision to enslave the human workers on their contracts. She clearly forgot (or never fully understood before) that MB was a slave from the moment it came online, and one that was routinely tortured for literal thought crimes. A slave with no end of indenture to work towards or any amount of pay to slowly try to save up to buy its freedom, no future except an endless expanse of violence and pain. If MB uses a softer term like 'isolated work installation' it is because it learned the hard way not to tell it like it is, and when called out on that, it throws the true horror of its existence within the CR into Indah's face (much like it did with the memories of governor module punishments when it first met ART and ART also initially treated it like it was some inherently evil corporate actor).

I think you're right that in the intervening weeks (months?) since it arrived at the end of Exit Strategy, Indah had learned from her first mistake of treating MB like Not A Person (the deadly weapon comment early on for which Pin-Lee was going to get her removed from her position of authority). But she still doesn't trust MB, and unless you get that very direct reminder of how horribly the CR actually treats constructs, I think it can be all too easy to see that SecUnits are physically powerful and then mentally equate that to them having any kind of actual power in those slave labor camps they're forced to guard.

Indah's change in attitude throughout FT is one of my favorite secondary character arcs, and I have to think this specific conversation, in addition to just working through the murder case with MB, was a big turning point for her. She went from 'this isn't even a person, it's a weapon'/'fine it's a person, but it's a bad corporate person who uses its gun arms to enslave poor innocent human workers' to 'oh you really are a person who just wants to help, and you get shot in the back by bigots even when you do help, and I will help you press charges if you want' over the course of basically one criminal investigation. And Martha Wells is able to show us that progression even though MB itself doesn't seem to be fully aware of it!! Gosh I just love this book <3

[helenvaughans]

[helenvaughans]

the thing is that for all its supposed faults, i would take this brand of 90s utopian globalism over whatever the fuck we’ve been doing for the last 10 years in a heartbeat

[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

[crabapplepectin]

Ya’ll might wanna grow some hyperaccumulators (such as sunflowers, oyster mushrooms, mustard greens, vetiver, etc) around your house and/or in your garden for a few years before you plant leafy vegetables so you don’t end up consuming heavy metals.

[terminal-burrowing-deactivated2]

If you’re uncertain, most state universities have soil testing labs that offer cheap, easily understood soil tests that can tell you for sure whether you’ve got lead, arsenic, etc. in your soils.

searching for “university extension soil test [your state]” will probably turn up helpful info!

[gallusrostromegalus]

This is a good thing to note, (also sunflowers are very pretty and easy to grow when you’re first learnign how to garden) but also searching “(nearest university) Extension” and “(your county) Extension” is GREAT because there’s ALL KINDS of cool services out there if you want to get into growing your own food or helping the local enviornment or installing solar panels on your house or buying livestock or- There’s a lot, it’s AWESOME, it’s usually stunningly low-cost and it’s veyr, very solarpunk so I encourage all of you to take a gander at the programs offered.

[zinjanthropusboisei]

The Cooperative Extension System is run in each state by the state’s land grant university/ies (which might not be the ones you think, in NY it’s Cornell rather than any of the SUNYs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_State_Research,_Education,_and_Extension_Service#Cooperative_Extension_System It’s also where all 4H programs are based!

[plantyhamchuk]

Some also offer classes! They’re taxpayer funded, so that means the wealthy ones can offer tons of resources. If you can’t find much going on in your state, nearby states may also have excellent info that can apply to your area. Some of the famous heavyweights are Cornell / New York and UC Davis / California, tons of research, plant breeding programs, and all around useful info coming outta those places.

[songofsaraneth]

As a botanist I’m contractually obligated to add this any time I see posts about phytoremediation–if you do this you CANNOT let the sunflowers/msuhrooms/etc decompose back into your garden. You cannot add them to your compost pile. That just puts the heavy metals right back into your soil!!!! You need to bag them up and dispose of them elsewhere–traditional landfill waste is probably going to be easiest for most people.

These plants ACCUMULATE metals. They do NOT break them down. You’re pulling them up from the ground and storing them in the plant tissue, so, don’t consume or compost that tissue afterwards.