The trilobites made me do it.

[homunculus-argument]

Any time someone starts some bullshit about how humans are hyperindividualistic and inherently selfish and exclusively motivated by self-intetest, I'll just tell them to go ahead and go do it then. Go live alone. Fuck off into the woods to make sure that no society ever benefits from your presence. See if you can teach yourself how to make a spear out of a rock or a shelter for one from nothing but your own wits and the nature around you. Go see how natural that feels, how happy it makes you to know that you don't need nobody and that nobody's life is improved by your presence.

[homunculus-argument]

So how come you don't have that skillset? Solitary animals that don't meet other members of their species outside of mating seasons tend to just fuck off from the nest and be completely fine on their own. Rattlesnakes don't need instructions for how to rattlesnake. Needing to be taught human survival skills implies you would need other people.

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

If only…

Trauma Geek

[barksbog]

look at her go

[barksbog]

this is my leopard gecko wheel propaganda post now

promote physical health (walky!)

promote mental health (fun!)

extremely cute to watch them toddle about in there

they love to sleep squished under them

apparently promotes healthy bowel movement (prepare for poopy wheel)

genuinely i know it looks silly and weird but it changed my leos life they use 2-4h a day just calmly walking

it reduced them scrabbling at the glass doors

my friend who has a disabled leo got him one and he is now moving so much more, which is good for his legs (muscles being built)

it's really cute

wheels should be at least 20cm diameter and solid, the wooden ones are great for grip and safety

leos don't go faster than this. successful wheel usage looks like Popcorn is demonstrating

[depsidase]

[frogliftcertified]

what is it they put in the hardware store to make it smell so good

[frogliftcertified]

OK 👍 that is helps

[depsidase]

[aroace-polyshow]

honestly i never thought the phrase “i want that twink obliterated” was like a sexual thing. like when i read the phrase i imagine “a meteor like the one that killed the dinosaurs is summoned from the heavens and hits the twink in question” type situation

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Wait, it's a sex thing? I've always assumed it was a supervillain giving his henchman orders to destroy the lithe young hero invading his evil lair.

[hobbular]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Yes exactly!

[snailfarts]

[mharti-mcfly]

[cleo4u2]

THIS. I saw a post the other day that literally said if you do it to a fictional character, you’ll do it in real life.

No. Just NO.

I’m so glad someone put it into words.

[asparrowsfall]

In art, we can be fucking nuts.

[lithugraph]

Art is the place to safely explore all those other sides of you

[mythid-cryptid]

I still can't stop thinking about cryptid Dovahkiin. Like there's just something about them distinctively inhuman that they can't shake. The way they travel effortlessly through the country. The way they somehow know where their enemies are at all times in combat. The way they can navigate to anywhere in Skyrim with nothing more than a vague description. The way they always know everyone's name, without speaking to them. The way they always know where their objective is, unfailingly. The way they are a blank slate, hardly emoting, often locked behind armor or a mask. The way they react faster than anyone would consider possible to changing situations, almost like they've done it all before. The way they are able to melt into the shadows when they hide. The way they are able to navigate the landscape with unfaltering ease, climbing sheer cliffaces and walking along mountain ranges. The way they APPEAR so human, but are just... not.

[targetedknowledge]

[queenofshenanigans]

Katniss Everdeen 🤝Crawler Carl: Undersharing, unreliable narrators with gold stars in That's Not Your Business, My Business, Anyone's Business, and I Don't Care About That, but I'm Going To Burn It All Down Anyway.

[ellewantsrevenge]

aadam jacobs's archive

[depsidase]

[what-even-is-thiss]

So many people who wanna argue with me about King Arthur clearly haven’t read the actual medieval texts. I know this because if they actually read the source material they’d know that when it comes to King Arthur, everything is made up and the points don’t matter.

[what-even-is-thiss]

“King Arthur couldn’t have fought the Roman Empire”

Try telling that to Geoffrey of Monmouth.

[what-even-is-thiss]

“You can’t just add in new characters”

Try telling that to Chrétien de Troyes. Aka the guy who invented Lancelot.

“Arthurian canon isn’t French”

Clearly you don’t own an air fryer. Also clearly you haven’t read literally anything written after the Norman invasion.

“Arthur needs to be a knight in shining armor”

If he lived at all he lived almost a thousand years before widespread adaption of plate armor.

“He can’t be in plate armor because that’s anachronistic”

Try telling that to Thomas Mallory.

“The fairy stuff is leftover from Celtic myth/Celtic gods)

A lot of that stuff including the lady of the lake wasn’t added until the 12th century actually. Centuries after England was christianized. It was also mostly added by the French poets.

[what-even-is-thiss]

God, I sure hope so.

[twoblogger]

It kind of fucks with me that somebody killed ötzi the iceman because ötzi himself is like whatever but the silent presence of human hands that drew back the string of the bow that shot the arrow that killed him is crazy. the idea that there were various people involved in that situation and while one of them has had his last hours painstakingly reconstructed and studied to no end, the others now only exist insofar that an arrowhead had to get into his shoulder somehow. imagine killing someone and then suddenly your entire existence is only a vague shadow implied by the fact that you killed them. much to consider

[twoblogger]

Testing the mummified bone marrow of ötzi to figure out his ancestry whole time there’s definitely another person, maybe more than one, standing in the room with us but I can never see or speak to them because I only know them through the assurance that they were there too in the form of one single arrowhead. I hate prehistory so much it’s unreal

[angel-derangement]

I hate it too tbh

[sepdet]

This art is meaningful and true and powerful, and I don't want to downplay your disquiet at all.

It's not the story we want from our distant past, that even during the end of the last Ice Age, when the obstacles to survival were many and great, the greatest hazard might already be: other people.

But scientists also found something else.

There's another person' blood across Ötzi's shoulders. Someone was leaning on him, and he was partly carrying that person, for some distance on the day or day before he died.

So as well as the presence of a killer— a rival, a fighter, a goat rustler or a hunter-gatherer resisting the invasion of stranger herders from the east — there is the presence of a comrade.

Kin, friend or (likely) both.

Maybe it was the person who'd made the tattoos that mark Ötzi's arthritic joints, for magic or acupressure or herbal treatment.

Maybe it was a loved one Ötzi was willing to die for, or who died for him.

His ending was painful, but he spent part of his final days in fellowship.

Hostility and love. In Ötzi's shadow, we see both.

[dash-n-step]

the english language is truly a wonder

[scribeofpnakotis]

all hail william the werewolf, proto-enby

[wretchedly]

Diversity win! The werewolf in your village goes by þei

[rohirric-hunter]

We laugh at how The Art of War is basically just, "An army can't fight if the soldiers aren't eating," but I'm reading this document about conservation of ancient yew trees and it legitimately says, "You should never fill the center of a hollow yew with concrete," so I think that probably making blatantly obvious statements is just the bane of being a specialist in anything

[v-spicata]

Ah yeah, that's actually not so bizarre when you know the reasons behind it. Still extremely wrong but understandable at least.

So yew trees are weird. They are extremely long lived with basically no known upper limit to their age. They do this by simply being extremely good at not dying like other trees do.

When a normal tree gets to an old age what usually happens is a fungus gets into their heartwood and takes hold. Their internal, dead wood rots away and they hollow out, lose structural support and collapse. Depending on the species this process can take decades or a good few centuries or so.

While yew trees do hollow out in this way they simply keep going afterwards. A ring shaped yew tree with most of its trunk missing is actually just middle aged and the most ancient yews get even weirder than that.

Wikipedia has this image of a Scottish yew where the start of this hollowing process can be seen. To be clear - for most tree species this would already have been fatal.

The thing is seeing a very old yew in this condition looks wrong to a tree surgeon, it's like the tree is constantly on the verge of death. So, if it's a well loved tree you try and do what you can to stop it from falling apart entirely.

A hundred years ago people tried all sorts of things like chaining up branches and also, yes, plugging the hollowed trunk with concrete. We know better nowadays.

Funnily enough there are even yews that survived this treatment and are still alive today.

This is a picture of the Tisbury yew in 1998 from the Ancient Yew Group, barely a minute ago from the tree's perspective.

Yews are fascinating plants with roots in European culture as ancient as the trees themselves. A few individual specimen trees are even estimated to be around five thousand years old - literally prehistoric in age.

Oh also they do weird things with sex as well sometimes. One of the oldest UK trees, the Fortingall yew appears to partially be turning from male to female on one side. It'll be interesting to see what becomes of it in the next few centuries of its life.

Sorry if this is all stuff you already know, I couldn't resist a chance to infodump about one of my favourite species.

[elodieunderglass]

🙋

What substances MAY we fill the centre of a hollow yew with?