The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.
Okay, so about a month ago, I decided that a million is too high, especially since I had comments limited for about the first 6 months because it took me that long to figure out how to turn them back on. (I’ve explained that I am very stupid.)
So I posted to my followers that I’d lower the threshold to 700,000 because I love you all and I’m starting to worry about a handful of you.
Anyway, we have passed 700,000 sometime in the last 2 days, which is great news because I already have an appointment with my tattoo artist on Monday. It will probably take more than one session, but I’m hoping to at least have a partially finished version to show off by the deadline in June.
For a number of years, my husband and I have had a running joke about trying to find the stupidest and unsexiest tramp stamp possible. Some of the contenders were Grandpa's janky bed from Stardew Valley or maybe SuperGrover, but none of them seemed quite right.
A year ago I noticed in the notes that my infamous bear post was 9 years old. I joked to my husband, "What if I got that as a tramp stamp?" We laughed. We paused. "But no, for real maybe I should do that," so I set a challenge. The post had just over 400,000 notes at the time, and I thought, "Maybe if it gets to half a million before the 10 year anniversary," but then decided, "That's too easy. They'll do that in a month or two." And you would have, so I upped it to the next nice round number of a million, knowing 2 things: 1: you'd never make it to a million (especially since I had comments turned off for the first six months until I figured out how to turn them back on), and 2: I was always going to do it anyway.
I was hoping to get more of it done before the deadline and was even scheduled for another session, but then my husband broke his foot and I had to reschedule and my tattoo artist left for France, so I won't be able to get it finished until probably July or August. There's more to be added and cleaned up, including colour, but here it is right now. I did not want to share my butt crack with the entire internet, so please enjoy the surrogate butt crack.
Having someone ask ChatGPT in a meeting is like being a grown-ass professional adult in a room full of other grown-ass professional adults trying to solve a problem, while a colleague with one of those baby toys that makes animal sounds repeatedly presses the cow button. And we all have to stop what we're doing and listen to cow go moo and say "wow hm yeah that's not really what we're asking but the cow does definitely go moo, good thoughts"
Except increasingly the cow is being treated as a respected contributor to meetings as we pivot to a moo-centric business model that principally produces bullshit
God sometimes I'm writing smut and I'll like, delete a sentence because I'm like, no, I can't write that. It's too indulgent. And then it's like. Girl, what the fuck are you even going to the candy store for if you're just going to buy raisins. Get real.
This artist’s impression pinpoints many cosmic voids –– relatively empty bubbles of space.
The universe is home to trillions of galaxies, each chock full of smaller cosmic objects like stars and planets. Since galaxies gravitate together in a web-like pattern, there are also immense open spaces called cosmic voids in between. In those growing, gloomy places, dark energy dominates.
Galaxies in this animation are structured a bit like a Hoberman sphere (a lattice-like toy ball that expands and collapses), growing farther apart as the universe expands.
Zoomed out maps of the universe show that galaxies often cluster together in bright city-like regions. Each cosmic metropolis is connected to others by interstate highways – vast filaments of dark matter, gas, and dust, along which additional galaxies can be found. This large-scale structure is called the cosmic web.
Way out in the boondocks – far from the galaxies and filaments – are the cosmic voids. They’ve been growing larger for billions of years, emptying out as gravity pulls matter elsewhere.
This animation visualizes the early universe, when the cosmic was full of a hot plasma soup.
Cosmic voids were born when the universe looked extremely different than it does today. Instead of being speckled with stars and galaxies, the cosmos was filled with a sea of plasma (charged particles) that formed a dense, almost uniform fluid.
There were slightly denser kernels of matter, like a single ounce of cinnamon sprinkled into about 13,000 cups of cookie dough! Since the clumps had more mass, their gravity attracted additional material. Those areas grew and grew, drawing more matter together to form stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters as the universe expanded over billions of years. Meanwhile, the spaces in between became ever emptier.
A simulation of large-scale structure forming under the influence of gravity.
Cosmic voids aren’t completely empty, though. They do have sparse galaxies, though they seem to have delayed development. Since there’s less matter, there’s weaker gravity pulling things together so stars and galaxies form more slowly. And those galaxies are isolated so they’re less likely to interact with others, which fuels growth in denser places like galaxy clusters.
But voids are mostly filled with things we can’t see. They contain a thin mist of dark matter along with a relatively larger amount of WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles) like ghostly neutrinos than we find elsewhere in the universe. Since there’s not very much stuff in voids to create gravity, a different force reigns supreme: dark energy, the mysterious cosmic pressure that seems to be speeding up the universe’s expansion. Since cosmic voids are influenced primarily by dark energy, they offer clues about its behavior.
Astronomers haven’t thoroughly studied cosmic voids yet, but our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be wide-eyed enough to reveal those desert patches of space like we’ve never seen them before. Studying them will show how the universe is put together and how dark energy is pushing galaxies apart.
If you could fly through the cosmic web at hyperspeed, you might see a view like this simulated one!
So far, scientists have found around 1,000 cosmic voids. Roman’s 3D surveys should find tens of thousands more, both large and small, scattered throughout earlier cosmic eras than previous large sky surveys could see. That means we’ll be able to watch how the most vacant places get even emptier over billions of years. And astronomers can trace any changes in dark energy’s might by seeing how it stretches voids, where dark energy dominates, across cosmic time.
Follow along with Roman’s journey to launch at nasa.gov/roman.
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