Sequential Magazine has nominated False Knees for Best Webcomic of 2022! They also nominated me for Favourite Cartoonist! I’m not sure what that means, but you can vote by going here and then clicking the big red button. Thanks!
I recall at least one of you guys having worked with livestock animals. Why are cows so damn indestructible while horses keel over and die if mercury is in retrograde or a dog barked in Kazakhstan?
Let me tell you a story about how livestock animals work.
In the beginning, God created the horse. God looked at the horse and saw that it was beautiful and strong. “However,” God said, “it breaks too easily.”
Then God created the cow. God looked at the cow and saw that it was more durable than the horse, and tasted good to boot. “However,” God said, “it poops too much.”
Then God created the goat. God looked at the goat and saw that it was perfect.
God looked around and saw that he still had some spare bits of fluff on his work table, but no brains to put into it. So then God created the sheep.
Now let me tell you what my equine surgery professor said on the first day of class.
“Horses are only interested in two things: homicide, and suicide.”
And that’s all you need to know about horses.
Except every goat is just waiting its turn to die of pneumonia
Sorry I’m not over “if a dog barked in Kazakhstan”.
My entirely half-assed understanding of Why Horses Explode If You Look At Them Funny, As Explained To Me By My Aunt That Raises Horses After Her Third Glass Of Wine:
Horses don’t got enough toes.
So, back right after the dinosaurs fucked off and joined the choir invisible, the first ancestors of horses were scampering about, little capybara-looking things called Eohippus, and they had four toes per limb:
They functioned pretty well, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, but they were mostly messing around in the leaf litter of dense forests, where one does not necessarily need to be fast but one should be nimble, and the 4 toes per limb worked out pretty good.
But the descendants of Eophippus moved out of the forest where there was lots of cover and onto the open plains, where there was better forage and visibility, but nowhere to hide, so the proto-horses that could ZOOM the fastest and out run thier predators (or, at least, their other herd members) tended to do well. Here’s the thing- having lots of toes means your foot touches the ground longer when you run, and it spreads a lot of your momentum to the sides. Great if you want to pivot and dodge, terrible if you want to ZOOM. So losing toes started being a major advantage for proto-horses:
The Problem with having fewer toes and running Really Fucking Fast is that it kind of fucks your everything else up.
When a horse runs at full gallop, it sort of… stops actively breathing, letting the slosh of it’s guts move its lungs, which is tremendously calorically efficient and means their breathing doesn’t fall out of sync. But it also means that the abdominal lining of a horse is weirdly flexible in ways that lead to way more hernias and intestinal tangling than other ungulates. It also has a relatively weak diaphragm for something it’s size, so ANY kind of respiratory infection is a Major Fucking Problem because the horse has weak lungs.
When a Horse runs Real Fucking Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of thier heart real fast and coming back from the far reaches of the toes much slower and it’s structure reflects that. But since there is Only The One Toe, horse blood comes flying back up the veins toward the heart way the fuck faster than veins are meant to handle, which means horses had to evolve special veins that constrict to slow the Blood Down, which you will recognize as a Major Cardiovascular Disease in most mammals. This Poorly-regulated blood speed problems means horses are prone to heart problems, burst veins, embolisms, and hemophilia. Also they have apparently a billion blood types and I’m not sure how that’s related but I am sure that’s another Hot Mess they have to deal with.
ALSO, the Blood-Going-Too-Fast issue and being Just Huge Motherfuckers means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating fucked up bones that replicate the way birds store air in thier bones but much, much shittier. So if a horse breaks it’s leg, not only is it suffering a Major Structural Issue (also also- breaking a toe is much more serious when that toe is YOUR WHOLE DAMN FOOT AND HALF YOUR LEG), it’s also hving a hemmorhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.
ALSO ALSO, the fast that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of thier evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for thier already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, fucking mental. Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if deinied the opportunity to ZOOM, it’s options left are “Kill everyone and Then Yourself” or “The same but skip step one and Just Fucking Die”. The other reason is that a horse is in a race against itself- it’s gotta breed before it falls apart, so a Horse basically has a permanent terrorboner.
TL;DR: Horses don’t have enough toes and that makes them very, very fast, but also sickly, structurally unsound, have wildly OP blood that sometimes kills them, and drives them fucking insane.
I am morbidly gratified that my deep suspicion of horses has grounding!
I recall at least one of you guys having worked with livestock animals. Why are cows so damn indestructible while horses keel over and die if mercury is in retrograde or a dog barked in Kazakhstan?
Let me tell you a story about how livestock animals work.
In the beginning, God created the horse. God looked at the horse and saw that it was beautiful and strong. “However,” God said, “it breaks too easily.”
Then God created the cow. God looked at the cow and saw that it was more durable than the horse, and tasted good to boot. “However,” God said, “it poops too much.”
Then God created the goat. God looked at the goat and saw that it was perfect.
God looked around and saw that he still had some spare bits of fluff on his work table, but no brains to put into it. So then God created the sheep.
Now let me tell you what my equine surgery professor said on the first day of class.
“Horses are only interested in two things: homicide, and suicide.”
And that’s all you need to know about horses.
Except every goat is just waiting its turn to die of pneumonia
Sorry I’m not over “if a dog barked in Kazakhstan”.
My entirely half-assed understanding of Why Horses Explode If You Look At Them Funny, As Explained To Me By My Aunt That Raises Horses After Her Third Glass Of Wine:
Horses don’t got enough toes.
So, back right after the dinosaurs fucked off and joined the choir invisible, the first ancestors of horses were scampering about, little capybara-looking things called Eohippus, and they had four toes per limb:
They functioned pretty well, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, but they were mostly messing around in the leaf litter of dense forests, where one does not necessarily need to be fast but one should be nimble, and the 4 toes per limb worked out pretty good.
But the descendants of Eophippus moved out of the forest where there was lots of cover and onto the open plains, where there was better forage and visibility, but nowhere to hide, so the proto-horses that could ZOOM the fastest and out run thier predators (or, at least, their other herd members) tended to do well. Here’s the thing- having lots of toes means your foot touches the ground longer when you run, and it spreads a lot of your momentum to the sides. Great if you want to pivot and dodge, terrible if you want to ZOOM. So losing toes started being a major advantage for proto-horses:
The Problem with having fewer toes and running Really Fucking Fast is that it kind of fucks your everything else up.
When a horse runs at full gallop, it sort of… stops actively breathing, letting the slosh of it’s guts move its lungs, which is tremendously calorically efficient and means their breathing doesn’t fall out of sync. But it also means that the abdominal lining of a horse is weirdly flexible in ways that lead to way more hernias and intestinal tangling than other ungulates. It also has a relatively weak diaphragm for something it’s size, so ANY kind of respiratory infection is a Major Fucking Problem because the horse has weak lungs.
When a Horse runs Real Fucking Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of thier heart real fast and coming back from the far reaches of the toes much slower and it’s structure reflects that. But since there is Only The One Toe, horse blood comes flying back up the veins toward the heart way the fuck faster than veins are meant to handle, which means horses had to evolve special veins that constrict to slow the Blood Down, which you will recognize as a Major Cardiovascular Disease in most mammals. This Poorly-regulated blood speed problems means horses are prone to heart problems, burst veins, embolisms, and hemophilia. Also they have apparently a billion blood types and I’m not sure how that’s related but I am sure that’s another Hot Mess they have to deal with.
ALSO, the Blood-Going-Too-Fast issue and being Just Huge Motherfuckers means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating fucked up bones that replicate the way birds store air in thier bones but much, much shittier. So if a horse breaks it’s leg, not only is it suffering a Major Structural Issue (also also- breaking a toe is much more serious when that toe is YOUR WHOLE DAMN FOOT AND HALF YOUR LEG), it’s also hving a hemmorhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.
ALSO ALSO, the fast that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of thier evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for thier already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, fucking mental. Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if deinied the opportunity to ZOOM, it’s options left are “Kill everyone and Then Yourself” or “The same but skip step one and Just Fucking Die”. The other reason is that a horse is in a race against itself- it’s gotta breed before it falls apart, so a Horse basically has a permanent terrorboner.
TL;DR: Horses don’t have enough toes and that makes them very, very fast, but also sickly, structurally unsound, have wildly OP blood that sometimes kills them, and drives them fucking insane.
I am morbidly gratified that my deep suspicion of horses has grounding!
[img txt: #simple #i would bunt the baby and sprint for first #thus making the problem that of handling the live ball/baby the problem of the catcher and third baseman #who would then have to throw the baby to first before I got there #Then I’d steal second because what’re they gonna do try to toss a baby back and forth to get me in a rundown? No fuckin way #I’d take a quick break on second before stealing third and then home #for the game’s single most upsetting inside the park home run]
Stop putting this christian baby in Situations
genuinely in love with the reveal, from the baby prodigy scenario, that Christian Baby does not refer simply to a baby baptised and born to christians, but to an infant that holds a belief in christian theology
Anyway last week my professor told the class “coworkers will put up with poor technical skills but they won’t put up with weird” and after class I just went and sat in my car and cried bc how am I supposed to survive if I still don’t seem “normal” even though I’ve been doing behavioral therapy since first grade but masking hurts so goddamn bad that I’m only doing two classes a week rn but I’m still falling apart and barely functioning every day and barely getting my work turned in bc i come home from class and collapse for days at a time and its just not fair, its not fair, why do other people get to be the normal, why do jobs get to be easy for other people, why are 66% of autistics unemployed/underemployed its not FAIR
This is the precise opposite of true.
Weird is fine. I do not give the slightest fuck about weird coworkers. Coworkers who can competently manage social situations well enough to cover for their incompetence to management? Those are the worst coworkers in the world.
Hoo-boy, your professor is a complete idiot who has apparently never worked a single job outside of the one they somehow landed to get paid for handing out shitty advice.
Your coworkers absolutely WILL work with weird. If you’re even halfway competent, they will accommodate weird. No seriously–because if you’re really competent, your coworkers will put up with raging assholes and miserable bitches because the bosses will love them enough to keep them no matter how terrible they are to work with, so in comparison? Weird but competent is nothing. We would pick you any day over the Queen Bee who you can’t even say “good morning” to because implying anything about the goodness or badness of the day was fighting words.
What your coworkers will NOT put up with is incompetence. People who refuse to be trained. Who make other people’s work more difficult by being so bad at doing their own. Who take the wrong kind of shortcuts or leave a task half-finished or try to wiggle out of doing what they’ve been assigned. It may not get them fired–some bosses really do believe that a warm body doing subpar work for ten years is better than taking the time to train one halfway intelligent person for one month–but your coworkers? Yeah, they’re going to notice that. You being weird? As long as you’re not making my workday more difficult, I could care less.
Speaking as someone who has been Seriously Weird in her entire career: if you are good at your job, your managers and coworkers will cherish you. If you are visibly weird, they will use you as an example of Weird But Competent.
Be weird, be polite, be good at what you do, and you will go far.
The argument here is that someday—not now, but someday—Google promises to turn off third-party tracking cookies in Chrome, and the new ad platform, which has some limitations, is better than the free-for-all that is third-party cookies. The thing is, third-party cookies mostly only affect Chrome users. Apple and Firefox have both been blocking third-party cookies for years and won’t be implementing Google’s new advertising system—it’s only the Chromium browsers that still allow them.
That’s actually what started this whole process: Apple dealt a giant blow to Google’s core revenue stream when it blocked third-party cookies in Safari in 2020. While it was a win for privacy, Google’s not following suit until it can secure its advertising business. The Federated Learning of Cohorts and now the Topics API are part of a plan to pitch an “alternative” tracking platform, and Google argues that there has to be a tracking alternative—you can’t just not be spied on. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also argued this when it called Google’s FLoC a “terrible idea,” saying “[Google’s] framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between ‘old tracking’ and 'new tracking.’ It’s not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.”
the blogsitter called the blog owner and said “everything’s great, but can i cover up the creepy clown jpeg next to the dashboard? it’s kinda freaking me out” the blog owner got quiet and then said “take the blog and leave the website right now. i don’t have a creepy clown jpeg”
Person B: Maybe do this thing and it’ll stop happening?
Person A: What do I look like, an idiot?
Yeah that unfortunately sounds about right for the average mentality of other Leftists these days. Very close-minded and extremely tribalistic to a fault.
The unfortunate thing discussed is being proven right, though.
That’s a thing that’s missing from the reenactment.
Listen I am well past my discourse days and do not care to argue this further.
But, if anyone reading this post interprets it the way unpopularly-opinionated summarized it you are either:
1. Intentionally acting in bad faith; or
2. Do not have reading comprehension beyond a ~4th grade level.
With the death of Jimmy Buffett, it’s clear the old world is dying. Boomerism slipping quietly into the night. Maybe no one else better represented its aspirational vision. The end of the work day. The end of history. The possibility, just over the horizon, of a terrestrial paradise. A cheeseburger in paradise.
