thanks for the comments and asks saying i'm being mean for very mildly saying i don't like when people make social decisions based on horoscopes.
your behavior has made me realize i should be "meaner": horoscopes are fake.
the position of planets and balls of gas did not in any way impact your personality or destiny. it has nothing to do with what kind of people you are compatible with, despite what an app or magazine told you.
i think sincere belief in horoscopes shows a concerning propensity to trust pseudoscience and a susceptibility to confirmation bias.
i'm pretty tired of having to tiptoe around this kind of thing and include disclaimers. if you genuinely think you shouldn't be friends with someone because of the date they came out of a uterus, you're being a clown.
tell that to the many indigenous peoples that created everything surrounding horoscopes and followed it as a religion. The zodiacs are in the stars and the movements behind astrology are very real.
why dont you like it? are you afraid of people looking into you? do you not like people seeing you for what you try not to be?
the problem isnt astrology. the problem is weirdos that cant think for themselves. dont bash something ancient bc some white girl said she wont talk to a gemini.
i despise capitalism and nothing here indicates i am a capitalist.
please elaborate on which "indigenous people" you believe followed the modern western take on the zodiac. go on. keep in mind they are not a monolith.
the age of a practice or belief system does not validate it to me. sorry. and, again, the western astrology people read about via apps is not an ancient practice.
i don't like it because i have no time for anything that insists the circumstances of one's birth dictate inherent personality traits, skills, and flaws. it is based entirely on confirmation bias and coincidence yet some people treat others differently because of their birth sign. some clowns have even used it for hiring practices. it is a pseudoscience and nothing good comes from treating such things as fact.
i am not afraid of anyone "looking into" me because my birthday would not grant someone any insight into my life, mind, trauma, or flaws.
you are 27 years old and having a tantrum because a stranger thinks star signs are fake. sorry you include them and your Meyers-Briggs (also a pseudoscience, btw; made by eugenicists, as well) in your bio but i promise there are other things you can base your personality and worth on.
@partiallyvoid-mostlystars Re: Capitalism, Google tells me that astrology is now a $12.8 billion dollar industry, with about $3 billion of that in the US.
Capitalism is using your belief in these false ideas to extract money from you.
Health & wellness grifters also love to appeal to this idea of "ancient practices" selling their products, but it's still snake oil. Belief in the 4 humors is also an ancient idea. That does not make it less false.
Hey! A bunch of the early Cretaceous fossils on each coast seem to have been plagiarized, too!
Coastline Similarity [Explained]
Transcript Under the Cut
[Panel 1. Miss Lenhart is holding a pointer pointing to a wall map. The map shows South America and Africa, with the east coast of South America and the southwest coast of Africa highlighted in red.]
Miss Lenhart: People had long noticed that South America and Africa had similarly-shaped coastlines.
[Panel 2. Hairbun and Cueball are sitting at school desks, looking at Miss Lenhart.]
Miss Lenhart: In the 20th century, geologists finally found the explanation:
[Panel 3]
Cueball: Plagiari--
Miss Lenhart: Continental drift.
Cueball: Oh.
Waking up from your decade long enchanted sleep to learn that, not only is sharing your True Name with the fae okay now, but there's actually a rule against using a false name when entering the faerie market.
Your friends admit that this causes some problems— it's way easier to fall victim to a false deal, or get stolen away now— but everyone goes to the fae market to buy their goods so what are you gonna do? Not see your friends? Go out of your way to buy more expensive stuff from the human market? Yeah right.
Also yes they still perform their light-footed fluttering dances under the silvery light of the full moon, but in order to get in you have to first watch the dancers perform two short plays about why you should shop at certain local businesses. Also if you want to talk about the performance afterwards then you need to trade them your True Name, your home address, your date of birth and your personal interests.
You do this so that the fae can this information on a scroll and give it to local business owners.
Another part of the deal they broke is that nobody may talk negatively about those businesses within the market walls. In fact, your friends say, the enchantment is so effective that it's very difficult to talk negatively about anything at all.
“I know it sounds un-good,” your friend admits. “But there are loopholes.”
“In retrospect,” another friend says, “I wish the town had voted un-yes to teaching the fae about money.”
“On the plus side,” the first friend says, “I hear the market is investing in one of those enchanted statues that responds to questions with deliberately ambiguous riddles, so long as you trade it your memories of secondary school.”
“Oh, cool. Is that why they're burning down the library?”
Long time reader and lurker of your Star Wars work, here. I just finished an Andor-Rogue One-Star Wars binge it really is the Lenin quote about "weeks where decades happen." So, I have to ask: what your characters thinking and doing when the news hits that a rebel network was wiped out, rebels found out about the death star, they attacked bases to get plans, they lost those plans, then some randos infiltrated the Death Star with the plans, rescued Leia, got tracked to Yavin, exploded Death Star?
I have thought about that a lot, and though I haven't settled on an exact reason, they were occupied with something else they thought was important. It’s like how I wrote in Bail attempting to contact Ahsoka during the Kenobi show but couldn’t reach her. Which I think is a plausible explanation. Given how important the Death Star was, and Ahsoka and Barriss being the heaviest hitters the Rebellion has, if they were near what happened, they would've gotten involved.
I’m the anon, freed from word count limits! Personally, I think the second option both the funniest and most interesting. The rebellion is big enough that the left and right hand, while knowing what the other is doing, can still get surprised.
That, and I love it when competent characters get blindsided by the shear audacity of reality to not make sense. I’d love to see the look on Ahsoka’s face, flip flopping between rage, grief, euphoria, and utter confusion.
The thing was a mound of flesh and mottled skin, as big as a barn and the shape of a pumpkin. Four tentacles as thick as trees hung limp at its sides; teeth ringed the gaping mouth at the top of its head like a crown.
A huge, sad whale eye the colour of wine stared at the knight. She could see her reflection in the jelly surface.
“We don’t know what it is,” she heard. “Some kind of monster that makes a perfect copy of whatever it eats. They think that was how the Dark Lord made his armies, feeding his minions to it so that it would make hundreds of copies of them. Do you recognize it?”
The knight opened her mouth. She hesitated. “Yeah,” she murmured, drawing out the word. “We found it in the Dark Lord’s tower, right?”
“That’s right. That’s where it ate you.”
The knight turned around and looked at her other reflection. This one appeared to be about ten years older, and had doffed her armor for a loose blue tunic and breeches.
She was holding a cup of tea. She had pressed another cup into the knight’s hand when she woke up here. It had been a shock finding herself suddenly out the obsidian dungeons of the Dark Lord’s tower and into this tall room of stone and straw. The warmth of it in her hands steadied her a bit.
“Everyone else in the party was worried, but then it started making copies of you,” the copy went on, staring up at the tentacled thing. “And all of the copies helped fight against the Dark Lord, and we won, and peace was restored across the land, but then nobody could figure out how to kill the damn thing or just to make it stop. Dozens of copies of us in a day, hundreds in a week, and then someone decided that the only thing we could do is just bring the thing here, seal it off and hope it starved to death.”
She sipped her tea. “Anyways, that was two-hundred years ago and it’s slowed down a bit. It can only make a new copy of us every few weeks now.”
The knight looked down into her tea. The copy had also draped a blanket over her shoulders.
“I have so many questions,” she said.
“I figured.”
“How can it be two-hundred years? I can still remember breaking into the tower. That feels like it was just minutes ago.”
“It was, basically. Your brain is a perfect copy of the original you’s brain at the exact moment she was eaten.”
“But the quest is just — done?”
“Yep. You missed some of the things that needed tying up afterward. There was a war, and a dragon, and some business about a ring.” She waved a hand. “It was before my time. Things are pretty settled now.”
“My parents?”
“Passed away about a hundred-and-fifty years ago. I’ve been told that they were very proud.”
The knight nodded. “Um. I don’t know if you know — we had an elf in our party—”
“I’m aware.”
“I — right. Obviously. Um. It’s just, after everything was done, I was going to ask her—”
“One of us did. She said yes. She outlived her. A couple of us have tried to reach out since then, but she wants to be left alone for a while.”
The knight considered this. “Uh — right,” she said eventually. Her fingers tightened around the tea cup. “Um. What do I do now?”
Her older copy shrugged. She had let her hair grow out again, the knight noticed. There were a few strands of grey against the black. “That’s up to you, I’m afraid,” she said. “A lot of us are finding work as soldiers and sellswords. We’ve done it for so long that most armies know we’re reliable and don’t tend to turn one of us away. Most of us are just sort of spreading out, wandering the world. Some of us keep in touch.”
The knight frowned. “What do you do?”
Her copy paused, tea cup half raised to her lips. “Sorry?”
“You said it only makes a new copy every few weeks now. So you just stay here and wait for a new one to show up?”
She lowered the cup. “Well,” she said. “I guess I just — I know what it can be like, waking up here in the dark, and it — it can be horrible trying to figure all of this out on your own.
“So I thought that what I’d do is just stay here with a pot of tea, and whenever I see myself again, I tell her that — that she’s not alone.”
“We aren’t?”
“Of course not. We’re all in this together, you know.”
#stories #:( does the flesh mound know that the dark lord is gone now #does it know that it’s safe #has it been in panic mode making clones for 200 years #just knowing that it’s running out of steam. it can’t keep this up #can the flesh mound get a cup of tea pretty please can someone give it a hug:(
“So do you live here alone?”
“Yeah, mostly. Just me and Moundy, basically.”
The knight stared. “Sorry — do you mean the flesh blob that ate me?”
“She ate me too, you know,” the copy said. She picked up a third teacup. After a moment the thing held out a tentacle, which the copy balanced the cup on. “Making a copy really stresses her out these days, so I try to calm her down when it happens.”
The teacup was raised to the huge wine-dark eye. It did… something to it, something like inhaling through its eye, gave a shuddering sigh and oozed in relaxation.
“It did eat you though,” the knight said.
“It was hundreds of years ago. I don’t hold it against her.”
The distinctive pinhole eyes, leathery hood, and numerous tentacles of modern nautiluses were traditionally thought to represent the "primitive" ancestral state of early shelled cephalopods – but genetic studies have found that that nautiluses actually secondarily lost the genes for building lensed eyes, and their embryological development shows the initial formation of ten arm buds (similar to those of coeloids) with their hood appearing to be created via fusing some of the many tentacles that form later.
There's a Cretaceous nautilidan fossil that preserves soft tissue impressions of what appear to be pinhole eyes and possibly a remnant of a hood, so we know these modern-style nautilus features were well-established by the late Mesozoic. But for much more ancient Paleozoic members of the lineage… we can potentially get more speculative.
So, here's an example reconstructed with un-nautilus-like soft parts.
Solenochilus springeri was a nautilidan that lived during the Late Carboniferous, around 320 million years ago, in shallow tropical marine waters covering what is now Arkansas, USA.
Up to about 20cm in diameter, (~8"), its shell featured long sideways spines which may have served as a defense against predators – or possibly as a display feature since they only developed upon reaching maturity.
———
NixIllustration.com | Tumblr | Patreon
References:
Anthony, Franz. "500 million years of cephalopod fossils" Earth Archives, 19 Feb. 2018, https://eartharchives.org/articles/500-million-years-of-cephalopod-fossils/index.html
Klug, Christian, et al. "Preservation of nautilid soft parts inside and outside the conch interpreted as central nervous system, eyes, and renal concrements from the Lebanese Cenomanian." Swiss Journal of Palaeontology 140 (2021): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13358-021-00229-9
Korn, Dieter, and Christian Klug. "Early Carboniferous coiled nautiloids from the Anti-Atlas (Morocco)." European Journal of Taxonomy 885 (2023): 156-194. https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2023.885.2199
Kröger, Björn, Jakob Vinther, and Dirk Fuchs. "Cephalopod origin and evolution: a congruent picture emerging from fossils, development and molecules: extant cephalopods are younger than previously realised and were under major selection to become agile, shell‐less predators." BioEssays 33.8 (2011): 602-613. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201100001
Mikesh, David L., and Brian F. Glenister. "Solenochilus Springeri (White & St. John, 1868) from the Pennsylvanian of Southern Iowa." Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science. Vol. 73. No. 1. 1966. https://scholarworks.uni.edu/pias/vol73/iss1/39/
Shchedukhin, A. Yu. "New Species of the Genus Acanthonautilus (Solenochilidae, Nautilida) from the Early Permian Shakhtau Reef (Cis-Urals)." Paleontological Journal 58.5 (2024): 506-515. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384922837_New_Species_of_the_Genus_Acanthonautilus_Solenochilidae_Nautilida_from_the_Early_Permian_Shakhtau_Reef_Cis-Urals
Wikipedia contributors. “Nautilida” Wikipedia, 26 Nov. 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilida
Wikipedia contributors. “Solenochilus” Wikipedia, 28 Apr. 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solenochilus
My mom accidentally joined a grieving support group (long story, she's not grieving tho) and she's missing it this week while visiting me and she's VERY concerned that Lorraine, who very kindly offered to bring a baked good like mom usually would, will NOT bring the correct kind of dessert, she says citrus tarts aren't "griefy" enough
ok so the way my mom accidentally joined a grieving support group when she's not grieving is this:
She's Catholic and has two churches. One is her Real Church but it's far from her house and tbh all the nice priests have died and the new priests are either lackluster or extremely conservative so sometimes she goes to the Other Church which is closer and more liberal but which she won't join permanently because she doesn't want to "cede the territory" of her Real Church to the conservatives (this is all backstory for flavor don't worry about it). Other Church once announced they were looking for volunteers for, like, a grief squad? Basically if someone was having a funeral but no one showed up to attend, the church would call in the squad and they'd mourn for the dead person and pray (which is important for Catholics because we believe you need that oomph to actually get to Heaven, don't worry about it). Anyway mom thought that was a nice concept so the next time she went back to Real Church she asked the head usher if they wanted to put together a similar squad there. The usher was like, oh we have one of those! It's every Wednesday night, you should join.
The miscommunication: the usher didn't understand the purpose of the squad mom was describing, just heard "grieving and mourning" and went to the next closest thing. Because my mom showed up to the Wednesday meeting and discovered a group of widows and widowers who are there to, like, discuss their own losses?
Why didn't my mom just leave when she realized the mistake? Great question. She had baked a cake (chocolate) thinking that would be appreciated (apparently funerals without real mourners are very short and boring) and she didn't want it to go to waste.
She stayed in the support group!! And has been attending! For a full YEAR.
She explained to the group leader that she isn't a widow and doesn't have anyone to grieve but all they said was "well everyone's lost somebody. Or will." So now my mom goes to the weekly meeting with her baked goods because she 1) doesn't want to be rude and leave the group and 2) apparently grieving people are the Most happy to get cookies so she gets to practice all these bonkers recipes shes wanted to try.
In mom's opinion the best kinds of dessert for grief is chocolate and caramel, or any kind of crunchy candy confection. Lemon and cream is "not mournful enough." She's absolutely wild I love her
#throwbackthursday to this very tall skinny piece of the great necromancer himself, Nagash. This was a fun piece to do. I was focusing a lot on atmosphere and lighting.
dailybridgerton
titsay
origamiaround
kaledo-art
tangentwithtanner
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
