i do believe your galaxy

alyssa ♡ 29 ♡ lesbian ♡ puerto rican princess ♡ i love hsm references & kisses *if you need me to tag something let me know*

[wtf-is-hockey]

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.

[pseudospaceship]

"what the fuck are you even going to the candy store for if you're just going to buy raisins" is honestly the thing I needed to hear today

[pollen]

Mary Oliver, from "Such Singing in the Wild Branches"

[yama-bato]

Shibata Zeshin, White Heron and Raven Flying, circa 1880

[loveridden1999]

i missed it but happy chungking express may 1st to those who celebrate

[poetrylesbian]

i think its beautiful that there are tortoises etc that have been in gay relationships longer than i have been alive

[poetrylesbian]

[herpsandbirds]

Satanic Leaf-tailed Gecko (Uroplatus phantasticus), family Gekkonidae, found in eastern Madagascar

photograph by jameshunt3a

[meedinuku]

so do we Tae, so do we 💜

[kropotkindersurprise]

May 1, 2025 - May Day demonstrators in Torino, Italy, burned Israeli, USA, and EU flags to protest the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, supported by the USA and most of Europe. [video]

[weltenwellen]

Mary Oliver, "When Did It Happen?", Felicity

[thoughtportal]

Whatever Sweater

[twirlingfreckles]

men’s hockey isn’t real they made that up for heated rivalry. In real life only women can play hockey

[fairycosmos]

i really don’t have the time to be the way i am

[amygdalae]

i wasn't conceived through sex I came out of a rothko and I've been trying to find a way back in ever since

[dogpuppy]

[ymutate]

Tony Matelli (born 1971) is an American sculptor

In an art show in SF.

Made entirely of painted metal.

[serps-up]

so happy and free

[reachartwork]

this is going to be a silly reblog but i have kind of a fixation on animal qualia and the idea of an animal's umwelt, so i ended up wondering whether pudding was actually "enjoying" this.

which meant i went and read about snail brains.

here's the bad news, at least by human standards:

snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.

pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.

snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."

so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.

and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.

snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."

if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.

pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.

i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.

snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?

so maybe the point isn't "this is sad because he can't enjoy it," but "this is a reminder that minds come in radically different shapes, and value doesn't have to be rich to be real."

[autistic-about-snails]

🥹 I'm ok I swear

[tuckedinbugw]

Nothing like holding my love