no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and it’s been twelve years since it happened

it’s such an unreal experience

like

you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face

and

you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is

it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing

But You Are Not Seeing Anything

Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.

But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.

So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.

Brain is like “there’s a hand there”

Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”

Brain is like “nice”

but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best

Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

we once went spelunking, and a our guide said that once he was in a cave with a stream, so he could hear running water, and his brain was like ‘oh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out there’. and he saw like…low light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.

As a cave guide: we call that ‘cave blindness’! True darkness absolutely wigs your brain out - we’re such visual creatures that after a while our brain throws a hissy after not seeing anything. Sensory deprivation is a very real kind of torture. We have a huge, deep cave system at work and there are a lot of places where you’re hundreds of meters in solid rock in this tiny, dark, still space.

I like to turn my torch off, sit down with my back against the wall,  and wait to see how long it takes before I start seeing things or feeling like the ground is moving, or hearing things. Because I know I’m not - I’m in complete darkness, utter silence, sitting in rock that hasn’t moved in hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Proof that brains are Ridiculous and over-react to a lot of stuff!

I want to add to this that people who lose their hearing as adults have reported hearing music “being played loudly from somewhere”, and other auditory hallucinations, bc the brain will just panic and put your brain’s ipod on *fucking shuffle* if it’s not getting any input

The city of Isin is not actually the city of Isin. Technically, it's the city of New New New Isin. That was the trouble with Isin. It was all wrapped up in itself. Like fabric around a nun, or a baby, or a whore.

People had been there, as in the physical location, for longer than history could be expected to remember. People have been in Isin since the word "people" meant something very different.

The first city called Isin was dragged kicking and screaming into the world by Heralds of the Church of the Third Sphere. A fourth-era religious order known for staunch orthodoxy and insufferable smugness. A cult whose grandest miracle was being almost universally despised by anyone who heard their sermons. Isin to them was a Good Rock. A polite term for "delusional pipe dream about the future City of God."

And it was a rock, a miraculously barren rock in the midst of a freezing swamp that only seemed to produce the sort of wildlife that stings and gnashes. Kunaabe oral history does seem to know of the location, but also seems to assume the foolishness of anyone attempted to actually travel there. This did nothing to deter the Church of the Third Sphere, as records indicate they were not aware of Kunaabe presence in the area.

The first 400 years of Isin's history were typical of other Good Rocks: regular periods of plague, mass starvation, and hyper-niche religious conflict boueyed by the occasional successful interaction with nearby Kunaabe and Baquari communities, at which point the enterprising trader would be ritually banished for speaking to hererical, racially impure outsiders.

Significant improvements were made to Isin after the local potentate promised that the Third Sphere would appear in the sky that spring. After the date passed, and no celestial body appeared to unite the Sun and Moon, the potentate was ritually burned to death, and his body was cast into Isin's only source of fresh drinking water. The fervent believers promptly died of several drinking-water related things at once. Those with a lick of sense brushed up on their Kunaabe and got busy creating a new sub-ethnicity, leaving Isin abandoned.

A decade passed. And much like the local chitin eel population grinding the corpse of the arch-astrologer into algae food, Isin soon became host to a new, beautiful population: Good, honest, criminals.

-- from An Addicts History of New Babel, by Ord Mornie

The tungsten revolution hit Isin like a brick to the face. A peasantry equipped with full exo-rigs could do the work of five men. Previously unliveable toxic swampland was cultivated into food-rich unliveable toxic swampland. Times were fat and happy. The people who worked in the fields could afford a second shirt, and the squabbling gangs of guild leaders and ex-bandit warlords could now throw the peasants in prison for failing to call them "Your Lordship".

The tungsten revolution brought changes. Changes chiefly in the form of exo-rigged cutting edges that tear through fifth-era armor like an orgasm through a wake. So, in a feat rarely seen among kings and politicians, the nobility thought about the future.

Tearing other nobles into little bits? That was all well and good. Gentleman's work. Telling peasants to tear each other into little bits? That was also well and good. A chief duty of every sensible noble. But peasants tearing nobles into little bits? That would be upsetting.

It was the tungsten revolution that prompted the newly-minted nobles to stop killing each other long enough to form the first Concourse of Five Houses. It was from this orgy of nepotism (in the name of peace of course) that the state of New Babel was born.

And it is here, with the bandit warlords who had the good sense to build a tungsten refinery, that we find the genesis of Isin's very own nobles. The Honorable and Noble House Maciae. Who are, legally speaking, not slavers.

-- An Addict's History of New Babel, by Ord Mornie

Next time transphobes call trans healthcare "experimental" you can show them this

penicillin was first discovered in 1928; vaginoplasty is less experimental

ibuprofen was first discovered in 1961; phalloplasty and HRT are less experimental

Adderall was first applied as an ADHD treatment in 1994; puberty blockers are less experimental

would also like to note that every single one of these procedures and treatments has been through rigorous testing usually both on animal models and humans in order to be approved as safe and effective by the FDA and not a single one is considered experimental. just in case anyone tries to be like "well HPV vaccines and Adderall are also bad"

Did you guys know the “Sickos” artist made a Sicko thats a WGA screenwriter on strike (said comic artist is a The Onion satirist comic artist and his name is Stan Kelly)

And honestly? What a mood. Haha YES indeed.

Older person: "kids have so much more today than we ever did!"

My thoughts as im nodding in agreement:

So it turns out these egg shaped ones are just a series of little mini plushes supplemental to larger more detailed ones. They don't have bigger versions of all the above yet but they also have some that were in a different set:

Also I'm willing to bet a lot of you don't even know that the nudibranch's eye placement is anatomically accurate

Ahh, it’s back

i have disproportionately strong feelings about this.

every time i say “nah i’m not gonna watch it again.” BUT I STILL DO EVERY TIME.

YEAUGH

Outsmarted by an orange cat, how embarrassing

kris and noelle discuss critically acclaimed fps game half dead 2, their missing siblings, and obscure human musicians like claude debussy

Cat sees long time human friend after a long time

(via)

obsessed with this silly tiger

PSA: *Beware* AI-generated fungi guidebooks!!

…Not a phrase I imagined myself typing today. But, via @heyMAKWA on Twitter:

“i'm not going to link any of them here, for a variety of reasons, but please be aware of what is probably the deadliest AI scam i've ever heard of:

“plant and fungi foraging guide books. the authors are invented, their credentials are invented, and their species IDs will kill you.”

…So PLEASE be careful if you run across anything of this kind.

(ETA: Corrected egregious typo in the title. Apologies, as I was [a] in bed [b] typing hurriedly and one-handed on the iPad, and [c] I think its native keyboard may need recalibration, but also [d] I was upset about what I was having to post, because seriously, WTF?!!)

My bf studied japanese in high school and often says "gambate!" (not sure of spelling) to be like. encouraging. I think it means roughly "let's get this bread." However, as someone who took spanish in high school, it always sounds like a command to me. And as near as I can tell, in spanish it would mean "go shrimp yourself."

I'm definitely not a fluent speaker, so I could be wrong, but here's how I got there:

In Spanish, some (informal, I think?) commands are formed by dropping the "r" from the end of an infinitive verb. (Every infinitive verb in Spanish ends in r.) For example, "to run" is "correr." If you want to tell someone to run, it's "corre." If you want to tell someone to do something to something/someone, you append a little pronoun thing to the end. From "besar" (to kiss) we get "bésame" (kiss me). From "cocinar" (to cook) we get "cocínalo" (cook it). From "callar" (to silence) we get "cállate" (silence yourself/shut up).

So, "gambate" immediately reminds me of "cállate," which is a rude command. It would be formed from the verb "gambar" and the second person object "te" for "you/yourself." But "gambar" isn't a word in Spanish. However, "gamba" is a word. It means "shrimp." So while it isn't technically grammatically correct, in the same way we "verb" nouns in English, the noun "gamba" is being used in the place of a verb here. "Gambate" (or more properly "gámbate" to maintain the correct stress for both the Spanish and Japanese). "Go shrimp yourself."

Native spanish speaker. You're quite right about your linguistics here, and spanish speakers love to make up new words by conjugating existing words (at the very least, my parents do)

My confusion stemmed from never having heard the word gamba before. To my knowledge the word for shrimp is camarón

So i looked it up and apparently gamba actually means prawn. So it's actually go prawn yourself

I realized I never posted these here on tumblr! 2020 did unspeakable things to my mind and body…I staggered away from lockdown with a whole pitch of how I would make an animated Cats adaptation. I got the whole thing up here *taps skull*—it would be Very Good. I can’t think about it too much lest I awaken my sleeping obsession…still want to finish Old Deut and Macavity one of these days.

Fun fact: The term "Jellicle Cat" is actually the cats’ mishearing of the term "Dear Little Cat" (this gives me much joy)

@thedrawingduke on Instagram

everyone should sometimes be cats it's good for you

Just a few examples of behavioural and genetic mutations observed in New England whitetail bucks. Researchers at the Ryers Institute have been tracking these abnormalities for almost thirty years; the epicenter of these phenomena appears to be somewhere deep in the Appalachian mountains, but the cause is unknown.

ALWAYS worthy of reblogging.

PAY IT BACK!

This is the only tiktok where the automated voice actually adds to the cinematic experience

freedom

This is absolutely what a cats internal monologue is like <3

Actually Ive decided to be angry now