@hemipelagicdredger / hemipelagicdredger.tumblr.com
Reblogging this manually. Op doesn't want credit for fear of being terminated.
[ID: art of the progress rainbow flag. The white, light pink and blue, brown, and black arrow stripes (which represents trans people, marginalized queer people of color, people with HIV/AIDS, and members of the community that have been lost) is replaced by the Tumblr disclaimer, “This content has been removed for violating Tumblr's Community Guidelines.” END ID]
While I understand that shitpost-y footnotes about titty pills are bound to have more notes than telling people about my book, it’s still a bit sad when the former gets 150k notes and the latter gets like 900. 😫
Listen to the hashtag poster!! Don’t disappoint them!
It IS a good book, and you should get a copy of it from your local purveyor of books.
I think there should be a reverse factory builder game where you gradually build up an interlinked ecosystem of plants and animals that ultimately dismantles the ruins of a giant sprawling industrial complex and restores it to a natural green space
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All of those expressions of surprise have subtle yet meaningful inflections to their use
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Omg :0
By existing as a citizen in and paying taxes to the imperial core, we automatically hold complicity in imperialist oppression because we are literally footing the bill for it. That is just the basic nature of being born to privilege in systems of oppression in general. We can be disadvantaged and marginalized in every single other consideration and we still have to understand and cope with this, and ensure we leverage it as effectively as possible.
Voting abstinence/sabotage does not absolve us of our responsibility to do everything in our power to lessen harm, but it DOES show that when our personal morals aren't satisfied, we retreat into (imperialist, this time) privilege to 'wash our hands' of the situation and declare it's not our fault and it's not our problem.
In other words “I know the trolley is gonna kill more people this way but the lever is icky and it’s more important that my hands don’t feel gross than it is that fewer people die. I’m a good person, watch me continue to shovel fuel into the trolley and preach against its trajectory while doing absolutely nothing about it”.
You know that trope where the author is like the Small Appalachian Town Church is actually worshipping something Far More Ancient Than Christ? The implication being that Christ isn't real but this old Eldritch thing is real.
Like, who cares if some little holler town has a Real God. The Christians ran Europe for like a thousand years. I feel like your Eldritch Horror has to be scarier than the idea of the Borgias.
I feel a similar thing for Illuminati stories. You cannot invent a Secret Shadowy Group of Puppet Masters that is actually scarier than how capitalism actually works for real.
i think even worse is how so much of american's christian faiths are rotten at the center because god isn't in there anymore.
like, the issue as i see it isn't 'our god is actually real and demands bloody sacrifice', for a lot of religious trauma and dysfunction in america, it's 'we built a religion that runs on blood instead of god.'
You hide this in the tags?
book recommendation if you like this post: Charlie Stross, "The Apocalypse Codex"
cc: @petermorwood
Oh hell yeah.
No shi zi bing though? It's been over a decade since I went to Xi'an and I still dream about those, especially the ones with the walnut-and-melted-sugar filling
‘Someone’ is probably Dryophytes versicolor
it's so happy to be there, too
Litany against anthropocentrism
[ID: A picture of an excerpt from the book A Natural History of the Future, which reads: "affirmation. 'I am large in a world of small species. I am multicellular in a world of single-celled species. I have bones in a world of boneless species. I am named in a world of nameless species. Most of what is knowable is not yet known.'" End ID.]
"Based on data gleaned from the nearly 10 million military dependents it insures, the U.S. Department of Defense has repeatedly called the evidence supporting ABA “weak,” noting there is no research to determine whether the small number of participants who show improvement — 15% — do so because of treatment or simply because a child has matured. After a year of the therapy, the department reported to Congress in 2019, 76% of 16,000 participating autistic children saw no change, and 9% worsened."
Okay before we get anyone on here saying "water is wet", here are some other bullet points about the article.
Honestly, this whole article is a gem. Remember, while "water is wet" studies seem trivial, we need them in order to get our side of the story taken seriously. Research with credible data that backs up what we've been saying is important!
TL; DR?
Huge study with lots of input from autistic people tells us ABA sucks!
Thank you for this addition. A better encouragement for this article than I managed!
since you liked the last barely-identifiable tuft of arthropod matter so much, here’s another:
a colorful ricaniid planthopper nymph creeping furtively away from me while hiding behind its wax plume tail.
as an adult, it will lose the wax fluff and hold its broad wings flat when at rest, like these ricaniids I saw nearby. I’m not sure if the nymph belongs to any of these species, though.
Ricanula sp., Ricania sp., Pochazia sinuata
Singapore, 2023
Daily reminder that we do not actually live in a dystopian movie put the apocalypse down and back away slowly. You know when your cleaning a room and you pull everything out of it's draws to sort through it and you're like "what the fuck have I done I'm never going to be able to tidy all of this" I think that's the stage we're at in the world. Thanks to social media we've pulled out all the messed up shit from the cupboards of the world, it was always there but now we can see it and we're going to have to sort it all out we made this mess and we can fix it. Falling to the floor sobbing will not clean a crusty room. A group of people working systematically (preferably with music in the background) will.
Your grandpa Bellowphone's cover of Skrillex' "Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites" on his "Squijeeblion", a pump organ with various acoustic honking noises attached. I'm sure Skrillex feels honored
Item: Squijeeblion, an air-powered instrument developed by a medieval peasant that had a time-traveler play them dubstep, loved it, and wanted to recreate it for themself
I’ll show you a clean pair of eels
my honest reel reaction to eel:
went to miami to recover father sotirios. and made some new friends.
these animals... they are wise. I recruited them to avenge my dear brother. I was then escorted out of the sea world.
Better than the 1596 Marseille dolphin exorcism I suppose.
In 1596 dolphins were infesting the port of Marseille. Back in those days, y’see, dolphins didn’t have the cuddly image they enjoy today. They were pests and were causing damage.
So the cardinal of Avignon sent the bishop of Cavaillon to do something about them. In front of a huge crowd, the bishop sprinkled some holy water into the waters of the port and told the dolphins to begone. Whereupon the dolphins indeed turned tail in terror and fled, and were never seen again.
Still not as dramatic as Saint Bernard excommunicating the flies though.
What happened to the flies?
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux built a monastery in 1124, but it was plagued by flies. So the good saint promptly excommunicated them. By the next day the flied had died in such quantities that they had to be shoveled out.
Still not as nutty as the Basel rooster trial though.
*everyone in unison* um what rooster trial?
In 1474, a rooster in Basel did the heinous and unspeakable act of laying an egg. As everyone knows, an egg laid by a rooster will hatch into a basilisk (or cockatrice).
So to avoid the creation of a cockatrice (or basilisk), the rooster was tried, found guilty, and burned at the stake along with its egg. A huge crowd was present.
The “rooster” in this case was likely a hen that had developed male characteristics (it happens).
Still not as properly legal as the Savigny pig trial though.
Ok, clearly you want an excuse to talk about the pig thing, and I now DESPERATELY want to hear about the pig thing, so PLEASE tell us about the Pig Thing.
In 1457 a sow killed Jehan Martin, a five-year-old boy in Savigny. For that crime she was put on trial and judged guilty, and sentenced to be hanged from a tree.
Her piglets, however, were judged to have been innocent of the murder, and so were returned to the owner, with the caveat that he had to surrender them to the law if they were later found to have eaten any of the boy.
Not to be confused with a whole bunch of other, similar porcine trials.
I won’t mention the 1454 excommunication of eels in Lake Geneva then.
OK what did the eels do, and more pressingly why were they in communion with the church in the first place
Animals are expected to be part of the Church by default, that’s why they take excommunication so badly.
Felix Hemmerlin’s treatise on exorcism, cited by e.g. Wagner’s Historia Naturalis Helvetiae (1680), informs us that around 1221-1229, eels once infested Lake Geneva in huge numbers. So Saint William, bishop of Lausanne, excommunicated them and banned them from the lake, forcing them to live in only one part of it.
Plot twist: as far as we know, Saint William was never bishop of Lausanne.
There’s no way you have historical Christianity nonsense more silly than this to share
I’ve been trying to stay on brand and talk about animals only, but sure, few intersections of Christianity and the legal system get sillier than…
Pope Formosus (“Good-looking”) was pope from 891 to 896, and apparently accumulated a few enemies. After his successor Boniface VI enjoyed all of a 15-day papacy, the next pope elected was Stephen VI.
And he hated Formosus.
How much? He had the corpse of Formosus exhumed, dressed up in papal vestments, and put on trial for his failings as a pope.
End result? Formosus was found guilty of papal fail. The corpse was stripped of its clothes, three fingers on its right hand were severed (no blessings for u), and it was tied to weights and dumped in the Tiber.
Needless to say Stephen VI came to a sticky end. An angry mob deposed him, he was strangled in prison, and Formosus’s corpse was fished up and reburied with honors. And the later popes passed edicts ensuring this kind of silliness would not happen again.
Tune in next time when I tell you about how a lawyer defended a city’s entire rat population.
Please, the rats, give us the rats, i beg....
The story of the rats of Autun is also the story of Barthelémy de Chasseneuz (or Chassenée, etc.), a highly original and highly talented defense lawyer. That’s him here.
When the town of Autun was infested by rats in the early 1500s, they were accused of eating the province’s barley crop and were duly summoned to be judged in an ecclesiastical court of law. Chasseneuz was the defense attorney.
How do you defend an entire swarm of rats? You don’t, is the answer. You delay. Chasseneuz’s original defense was “my clients live all over the place, one summons won’t be enough”. So he got a court summons to be posted in all the infested parishes.
When the rats didn’t show up after the elapsed time delay, Chasseneuz proceeded to explain at length why. The rats didn’t come to court, he said, because of their enemies the cats, which are everywhere and always vigilant and hungry. “You cannot expect my clients to undertake a journey which would put them in mortal danger”, he argued in complete seriousness. “Thus they have the legal right to turn down a summons that endangers them”.
As far as we know, the rats never did appear in court, and remained unprosecuted.
Chasseneuz went on to have a distinguished career as a lawyer and was allegedly killed by a poisoned bouquet of flowers.
Today I learned that there's a specific name for those floral-looking typographic widgets which are used to indicate a break or omission in a body of text, and you may be surprised to learn what that name is.
If the dinkus looks like a little leaf or something, it's more specifically a fleuron! A dinkus can also be simpler, like the line of three asterisks in the Wikipedia preview above.
It's a bit misleading to say that it's "more specifically" a fleuron. A typographic element can be both a dinkus and a fleuron, but a fleuron is not a kind of dinkus; there are also fleurons which are not dinkuses (and vice versa).
