…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.
Since my previous podcast recommendation list was pretty popular, I've decided to make another, with another bunch of excellent podcasts:
13 Minutes or Less - Short podcast with very short episodes, about a pizza chef who doesn't like dealing to people but has to do some deliveries due to short staffing. Very much not her thing, but she does her best. As it turns out, her clients are quite a bit stranger and spookier than expected...
Additional Postage Required - Sci-Fi adventure about a nonbinary courier who gains the ability (or curse...) to get visions about the contents, past, and sender of packages they touch. They get roped into a rebellion. There's hoverboard racing. It's awesome.
Among the Stars and Bones - A team of xenoarcheologists search a distant world for traces of a long-vanished aliens. It's been a while since I watched this one, so I don't remember it very well, but I know that I enjoyed it. Very good sci-fi horror.
Dark Ages - Fantasy workplace comedy about a supernatural museum. Quite a lot of fun.
Dragon Shanty - Fantasy story about two bards traveling the high seas. There's dragons aplenty. Very queer. Excellent songs.
Falling Forward - Hacker story loosely based on the myth of Icarus and the Labyrinth, about getting back at a terrible corporation. Kinda experimental, this one has the shortest episodes I've ever seen.
Hotel Daydream - Podcast about the goings-on at a supernatural hotel. Very inventive, with really interesting characters.
Jar of Rebuke - Mystery about a researcher at an ominous cryptozoological organization out in the rural US. He's got no memories of his past and keeps dying and coming back. A story about cryptids, identity, queerness, neurodivergence, and community.
Light Hearts - Slice of Life podcast about turning an old, haunted building into a cafe and queer community center. The ghosts lead to some very fun shenanigans.
Lost Terminal - Mentioned in the other list but not expanded on. This is a hopepunk story set on an Earth devestated by climate change. Told from the POV of an adorable AI who watches this Earth from a space station, observing how humanity re-builds itself and finds a brighter future.
Mayfair Watchers Society - You know Trevor Henderson? The guy who drew Sirenhead, Long Horse, and other such creepypasta creatures in his found footage style? Yeah, this is a horror anthology based on his works, directed by him. Set in the rural town of Mayfair, where strange creatures are a lot more common than elsewhere... Each episode has a slightly different framing device, with some being found footage audio, others meeting recordings, phone calls, etc.
Monstrous Agonies - An advice podcast for the british creature community. Many of the advice letters are sent in by listeners - there's two by myself, one from an ant that can hear and send radio and one from a fey who is looking for curse advice. Some letters are metaphors for queerness, clashing cultures, ableism, and minority communities, others just some urban fantasy fun. Has a little bit of plot, but most episodes have an anthology style. Fast approaching the finale!
Mx Bad Luck - Slice of Life about someone who is cursed with bad luck. Sometimes sad, sometimes funny. Can recommend.
Neighbourly - Neighbourly follows the residents of Little Street, house by house. What they do, how they interact with each other, and what skeletons are hiding in their closet. Starts out as a spooky urban fantasy thing that's almost an anthology, but weaves itself into quite a mysterious plot over time...
SINKHOLE - Short-form audio podcast presented as a collection of audio posts from a member of a community of data restoration hobbyists in a sometimes-unfamiliar future. Mystery about disability, internet communities, and how things change with time.
Second Star to the Left - Scout-explorer Gwen Hartley has five years to explore and prepare her planet for settlement. With no aid but her robots and the anxious voice of her long-distance scout-minder Bell Summers in her ear, she's hoping she's ready for anything.
Someone Dies In This Elevator - Anthology where every episode, someone dies in an elevator. You wouldn't believe how creative they get with that simple concept!
Tales from the Low City - By the maker of Mistholme Museum, this podcast explores the everyday lifes of the last people on an alien world, after the surface had become uninhabitable and everyone had fled down into the last city, the subterranean Low City. This one made me cry a lot!
Tartarus - In a secret facility deep beneath Antarctica, an anxious astrobiologist, a terse station manager, and an AI keep humanity safe from the monsters they imprison.
The Attic Monologues - Queer urban fantasy story about a university student who decides to record themself practicing monologues using a collection they found in their attic. Don't forget to listen to the post-credit scenes!
The Bridge - Surreal alternate universe horror story about the keepers of a bridge over the Atlantic. Gets pretty spooky.
The Green Horizon - Sci-Fi comedy about a na'er-do-well Irish space captain and his rag-tag crew traversing a war-torn galaxy in search of fame and fortune. Very fun podcast.
The Lavender Tavern - Anthology podcast with original gay fairytales. Most are quite memorable!
The Vesta Clinic - Sci-Fi story about a clinic that helps various interesting alien lifeforms with their medical issues. Excellent worldbuilding and characters!
Tides - The story of Dr. Winifred Eurus, a xenobiologist trapped on an unfamiliar planet with hostile tidal forces and a fascinating ecosystem. She must use her wits, sarcasm, and intellectual curiosity to survive long enough to be rescued. But there might be more to life on this planet than she expected...
Hope this list is as helpful as the last!
@boombox-fuckboy @marvelousmawn @sapphireclaw @ashes-in-a-jar @frogmomentsfrombeyondtime @time-is-restored @emmy-noethers-rings
You folk seemed the most interested in the other list, so I'm being bold and @ing you all.
I'll admit it I'm a freak who loves airplane turbulence it's like a roller coaster to me. It's fun and a rush and I'm tired of pretending it's not
NO NO NO TUMBLR I DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WANT TO SEE WHAT MY MUTUALS LIKED. I WANT TO SEE WHAT THEY'VE REBLOGGED. IF IT WAS WORTH SEEING THEY'LL PUT IT ON MY DASH 37 TIMES
Thank you, everyone, who's reblogged this 37 or more times in a row and my apologies to your feeds.
I don't remember who it was, but I remember somebody a while ago said that this particular MCR song synced up really well with the Saturday Shorts dance, and I've thought about that every time I listen to this song. I couldn't find the post, so I recreated it.
if thousands of conservatives could quit bud light over making a SINGLE can with a trans persons face on it, you can quit chic fil a for them donating millions to anti lgbtq groups and harry potter for being written by the face of TERFS.
Don't let conservatives be the ones with the stronger resolve, guys. If we want to act like we're better than them, we're gonna have to like... Actually be better at following our own ideologies.
The Hidden Problem of Outdoor Cats: Ecology of Fear
As a huge cat lover who grew up with cats and adores every part of them, outdoor cats are a problem. You’ve probably already heard this, but domestic outdoor cats are responsible for a staggering number of extinctions in local bird populations, even if someone thinks their “sweet little baby would never hunt” because the cat definitely has. But that’s old news, and I’m here to present another (probably already done) theory on why these cats cause problems, and that is a concept called “The ecology of fear.”
Ecology of Fear is a semi-recent concept coined by ecologists that talks about the indirect impact predators have on prey species. Basically, besides directly influencing prey populations by killing prey, there is a broader impact caused by just the presence of a predator that causes defensive changes in behavior. This change usually involves being much more cautious, meaning there’s more energy devoted to being alert and weary and less energy spent on growth and reproduction. There’s also less food consumed because the prey cannot spent large amounts of time in the open. So what does this mean for cats?
It means that even if your cat has less than one brain cell and doesn’t know how to hunt and is scared of grass like mine is, it doesn’t matter. Just the existence of a cat in the area causes local animals to chance their behavior, often with negative impacts for themselves. Birds and other prey species already have to deal with natural local predators, and adding the pressure of cats into the system tips the natural balance too far against the prey.
So please keep your cats indoors, both for their safety and the safety of local animals.
Sincerely,
An aspiring ecologist
(Also: if you’re interested in more details on the ecology of fear, a good documentary to watch is “Nature’s Fear Factor” on PBS. It’s about the reintroduction of wild dogs to Gorongosa Natural Park)
as a lifelong dinosaur enthusiast who moved towards interest in ecology in recent years what you said about paleontology being very holistic is very interesting to me. can you list, like, some examples of how that is? and if you think the same could be said of ecology as a field? especially if ecology n evobio share the disproving capitalistic ideology thing
all three are 100%
capitalism operates on a misunderstanding of nature and has an implicitly impossible objective
"infinite growth" in a universe with finite resources is not possible. the end.
and one thing we see throughout the fossil record, and in modern ecology, is how the limitation of resources leads to major changes, thus demonstrating that said limitation exists
furthermore, none really make money. the people who buy dinosaur crap are not that many. the fossils don't lead to profitable technologies or franchises (I'm excluding fossil fuels from this conversation, which are the Exception, but every inherently anticapitalist field has *some* Exception) and most paleontologists are ridiculously broke, and even our top paleontologists don't really get far beyond 100k in terms of salary (which is depressingly low compared to other academics in geology and biology)
it also demonstrates the interconnectedness of all life and how our history is the history of the world, not just the history of humans or even mammals
how much our evolution isn't just dependent on our genetics, but on our ecology, the things that live with us and shape us through life
disproving bioessentialism, the inherent assumption of many other destructive ideologies such as racism and transphobia
how even the rocks have importance far beyond what we give them as they are the primary recorders of our planet's history
how small humans are and how little right we have to bleed the planet dry like we're currently doing
and how, like all species that specialize too quickly and too largely, we are careening towards our own destruction in the process of the planet needing to heal.
I hope that last sentence isn't true, but the fact that we know this at all is thanks to paleontology and environmental science.
All of these fields poke back against the capitalistic, white-supremacist world. So it's hard to get into them, it's hard to stay in them, and it's hard to make a living in them.
Ftr, this is why I study paleoecology specifically, but I think paleoecology should be in common parlance as equivalent to brain surgery or rocket science bc I think I'm breaking my brain
u know what will really ruin ur day? anything if ur sensitive enough
is annabelle cane actually canonically linked to purple at all or did we just collectively hear her speak and think ‘oh she’s Ourple as Fuck’
4 episodes into The Silt Verses and I’m already being so normal about it
Okay something that bothers me is the fact physics is seen as the more prestigious of the three main sciences, with biology at the bottom and chemistry in the middle. Like. I doubt most people could name a famous biologist, but they could name 5 famous physicists. Why are Albert Einstein and Stephen hawking household names but Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk aren't?
Not to dismiss the accomplishments of Einstein or Hawking, or their genius, but their actual tangible contributions to society have been miniscule compared to that of Borlaug or Salk who have each saved LITERALLY hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives each. Half the food on your plate was probably grown thanks to Borlaug and Salk is the reason half your siblings didn't die of polio as a kid.
Sure Einsteins theory of relatively is important for modern satellite communications but really though how can it compare?
This is coming from someone who studied physics. I love physics, and years ago when i was at uni I looked down at biology and so did everyone else studying physics. And I know others did too. Retroactively of course I know this was so very wrong.
If society as a whole started treating biology with more respect then maybe more students would go into that field. If we had rockstars of medicine and agricultural science that were household names rather than just physicists? think of how many more lives could be saved, how many more lives could be improved.
I'm not saying physics isn't important, and more scientists of any kind is always good, but proportionally I think societies priorities are a little skewd.
Relevant xkcd
an incomplete collection of tweets i consider to be short poems
i have some too
Please enjoy this video of what is probably my favorite animal behavior I've ever caught on film. These birds are two juvenile Nazca boobies and as you can see one of them is showing off an extremely impressive ability to toss and catch a small rock/dirt clump with their beak. This behavior is believed to be a form of play in young diving birds that serves to train the finely tuned motor skills they'll need to catch fish once they reach adulthood. Suliform birds are some of the best fishers in the world and after observing this level of skill it's easy to see why!
facts about The Fear, after 20 years of life with her
The Fear is NOT:
The Fear IS:
yeah, so, i've had severe anxiety for my whole life and the way it's been treated and dealt with, and the way I've been taught to understand it, has really fucked me up so I am trying to lay the groundwork for understanding it differently
I think it's pretty fucked up that we're taught to see anxiety as deceptive or inaccurate. Now, obviously the images or projections in my fearful thoughts do not usually "reflect reality," but I have come to see this as...not particularly important?
Teaching an anxiety sufferer to restructure their thoughts to dismiss and contradict "irrational" fear is, in my opinion, the same as teaching a chronic pain sufferer to restructure their thoughts to dismiss and contradict pain with no clear physical source. You might as well speak of "irrational" pain, and pain has the same relationship to rationality that fear has.
"Irrationality" is a quality assigned to fear that is judged by an outside observer, or by the collective cultural biases and hang-ups of a society, as not appropriate to a given situation. This is total fucking nonsense and we should be talking about that, because...well, the first reason is that it implies some kind of fixed standard for what fear ultimately is and isn't for. i like to tell people to watch one of those Coyote Peterson videos where he's going to get a tarantula hawk wasp to sting him, because he's obviously having a strong physical fear response, even though he knows it won't kill him. Is it "rational" to fear suffering and not just death? How much suffering? Sit with that one a little while.
The second reason, which is even more convincing, is that the "rational" brain is not consulted at any point, ever, when a person feels afraid. It's just a response. The fear response is not routed through the conscious, sapient, reasoning brain. And thank God, because if we needed to hear back from an upstairs executive before we could decide whether to run from a lion, our species would be extinct.
Techniques like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy were absolute fucking shit at making my life any better, but fantastic at wrecking my ability to identify my own emotions, because Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for anxiety basically amounts to trying to brainwash yourself into thinking you don't feel the emotions that you do. It's a really neat way to develop bizarre psychosomatic symptoms and start experiencing anxiety through constant body pain, swollen lymph nodes, and digestive issues.
For an institution that pathologizes having "alters," psychiatry sure loves to encourage a suffering person to view normal and ultimately good parts of themselves as distinct, intruding entities to be shoved in a closet somewhere.
And yes. Fear is ultimately a good part of you, a part of you that loves you.
What began to set me free was feeling that acid terror and sickness and rage course through my body and realizing—really realizing—that I was being illuminated with this ancient, powerful force driving me to LIVE.
I want us to make it. I want you to live.
And you know what, I want me to live too.
I abandoned the doctrine of calming down—Lord knows it had never worked anyway—and started really just exploring and existing in the Fear.
How did that feel? Bad. Very very very very very bad and really not productive or helpful at all initially. Which was unavoidable. Necessary. She had been frantically clawing to communicate with me for so long, and I had been shutting her away, silencing her, resenting her presence in my psyche. I started trying to show gratitude toward the signals my body gave me. I started trying to show gratitude toward her—and i guess the Fear was a Her now, this just seemed more respectful.
And it seemed like nothing happened, but several things happened.
I stopped searching for validation. That was a big one. At some point I just...stopped needing a "reason" or justification for the fear I felt (trauma???? neurodivergence???? neurodivergence trauma????) and the fact that I experienced it became completely sufficient and satisfying to me. So much guilt and confusion disappeared.
I also became steadily more confident about my own boundaries, particularly in regards to recovery.
It's awful now that I think about it, but I think I felt this sense of almost moral obligation towards "recovery," as if I needed to "overcome fear" to be Courageous and Virtuous. It made me feel crushing guilt to feel any hesitation about this.
But then this started to change. It became more real to me that was the only person affected by the steps I did or didn't take toward recovery, and there was no moral dimension to it. A therapist couldn't put me in a box I wouldn't willingly go into.
Freedom from these judgmental frameworks is really important to me. I think that I always hated the idea of getting "better" because it seemed like "better" would mean just getting better at submitting to things I was afraid of while everything felt just as bad as it always did on the inside.
And on some level—even though I could never put it into words at the time—I violently hated the idea of "recovery" from some of my fears because it seemed like the ultimate denial of agency. I didn't want to "become okay with it"—the possibility felt dehumanizing. It felt awful.
And I realize now that this is because The Fear represented something I needed to have a right to. Many of my most life-destroying fears centered around things being done to my body, and if I could have pressed a button and been no longer afraid, I wouldn't have, even though it would have spared me so much suffering, because...I needed it to be okay to want agency over my body. I needed it to be right. The Fear, in this case, was a demand that my body be treated as sacred.
I realized that there were many cases where The Fear was a territorial claim of sorts, a demand that certain needs be honored and met—She needs this. This is FUCKING non-negotiable.
And it really...prompted me to look backward on my life and see The Fear differently: not as a responsibility I had failed to shoulder (me?? a little child??? responsible?? Responsible for being brave, when every day felt like facing a firing squad?????) but as a collective responsibility
Because I was not alone in those memories—I was surrounded by adults that saw me suffering, and often dismissed, ignored or ridiculed it. The Fear grew larger and larger; why?—to protect me. Because teachers, nurses, doctors, and camp counselors did not do any of the thousand thousand things they could have done to make that little girl feel safe. Because my well-meaning parents praised me when I was "brave" but I, a little kid, literally couldn't communicate how awful it always felt.
The Fear was not there to torture me. The Fear was and is doing her best to keep me safe. It's not wrong, there's no need for guilt. It just is.
It doesn't feel good. But maybe one day it will feel better.
this alignment chart but with songs off three cheers. i feel pretty confident in this placement considering there was a week in my life where this was the only thing i listened to but lemme know in the tags your placement of the songs!
you have to listen to loud music . it scares the evil creatures from your head
wormless behavior from some of you. absolute lack of dirt and burrowing. rethink
