So. Storytime for guerilla gardeners and solarpunk enthusiasts. This story comes to me 3rd hand but I believe the basic shape of it is true, even if details may be off.
So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).
However
After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.
Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.
So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.
I love a couple of things about this story:
Offering to maintain people’s front yards for them allows baby boomers to feed their thirst for keeping up appearances while still getting food production into the neighborhood
As homeowners age offering services like this is legitimately good community building
BLOCK-LONG POCKET FARM
These exact circumstances might not be replicable everywhere, but I love thinking about how these principles could be applied.
gendered individual bathrooms piss me off. what’s the fucking point. if someone’s in the men’s fuck you im using the women’s. the only person I could possibly make uncomfortable is myself
it really is insane how little you hear about “america has the world’s highest prison population by such a significant margin that it would be seen as excessively over-the-top if it was used in fiction”
before you say “4% isn’t that big of a difference between the US and China”
for anyone bad at math 1.4 billion divided by 340 million is about 4. we have a fourth the population of china but a higher prison population and a higher incarceration rate by far. this is just widely publicly available information that you’re supposed to just accept. it’s not supposed to make you go insane.
The US has the largest prison population AND the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. The US is home to 4.2% of the world’s population but 20% of its incarcerated population. More than 0.6% of the US population is incarcerated.
Men make up 93% of the US prison population, but despite this, the US accounts for 30% of the GLOBAL population of incarcerated women.
Housing insecurity is the most significant predictor of incarceration with 22% of state prisoners experiencing it shortly before incarceration.
12% of state prisoners in the US were unhoused before their 16th birthday.
68% of US state prisoners were first incarcerated before their 16th birthday.
More than half of people in prisons and jails in the US have a mental illness.
Cognitive learning disabilities occur in state prisons at nearly 500% the national rate.
[all data sourced or derived from the Prison Policy Initiative]
personally I don’t think if you’re a kid you should be using your real name on the internet. very easy for people to find out too much about you. instead you should spend years using a different made-up name that becomes part of your persona to an arguably even greater degree than your actual name and then when you grow up and find out you’re trans you have a ready-made name to switch to even if it’s probably like Leaf or something
“ohhhh i’m an influencerrr” you are a shill. you are the fucking slap chop guy. sell me some oxyclean
at least billy mays had the dignity of snorting a huge line of cocaine and just yelling grinningly at us about Product. you are on instiktam.com doing a little dance like a circus animal. you are giving yourself airs over being a costumed street corner mascot for a car dealership. you don’t even have a close enough relationship to the product you’re pushing to call yourself a huckster. be ashamed
theyre called lossy files cause theres a very small frenchman named fourier in the computer that keeps eating little chunks and pieces of the data cause hes a hungry little boy and eventually theres no data left over
just saw a post that accused someone of using generative ai to write an essay because ‘no one uses — instead of commas or semicolons’ and i’ve never been more offended in my life
ALT
i’m not as offended as i was when i read the ai thing, but i Am offended
>Hear people constantly complaining that the current union leadership is super corrupt, it’s all just the same ten guys making all the decisions in secret and nobody else in the union ever gets to know what’s going on
>Go to the monthly union meetings that are completely open to all 1200 union members
>The only attendees are the same ten guys every month, giving detailed reports about everything that’s going on
Yeah, there’s a surprising amount of people who just…don’t interact with the union they are in at all. At all. And then complain when shit gets voted in they didn’t want.
Maybe get involved. Show up to shit. Just a thought.
This is also true of the Democratic Party btw. People are always complaining about what “The Democrats” should do, or aren’t doing etc etc.
but like literally in my early 20s I started going to my local party’s meetings regularly and with-in a few months they were like “hey you want to be on the committee to re-write our by-laws?” yes, yes I do thank you. “hey you want to get elected to be one of our representatives to the meetings of the state party?” why yes thank you so I got to go and debate the budget of a swing state Democratic Party.
I had to move for work not that much after that but like people I know from that have been delegates to the DNC, have elected officials come to their homes for events. Literally there’s a middle aged lady I know who when Hillary Clinton decided to run for President, Hillary started with a small tour on a van, she called it her Scooby Van, and her first stop in New Hampshire, with its “first in the nation” primary was to a bakery in my home town and the person she sat with at what was her first or second official campaign stop of her run for President is a lady I know who isn’t some super secret Democratic overlord or anything but a local lady who volunteers a lot.
Just the other day I got invited to meet my Senator (again) tomorrow I’m going to meet my state’s governor (again) because I volunteer, if I wanted I could likely get to be a delegate to the DNC
so many organizations are open doors that people just refuse to push and then are big mad it didn’t read their minds and do what you think.
I live in a town of 960 people, and four years ago I ran for an open seat on the Library Board; within three months I was chairing the board because the lady who was the chair had been doing it for 14 years and she wanted a break. Someone also threw my name in the ring to be on the school board; another candidate won the seat that time.
In my first three years on the library board, we
a) lost a librarian to a car accident,
b) hired an interim librarian,
c) hired a permanent librarian,
c) wrote an anti-censorship policy,
d) balanced the library budget three years running,
d) started a Friends of the Library group,
e) organized our social media campaign,
f) joined the statewide electronic catalog, and
g) quadrupled our library membership.
So when I ran for library board for my second term, I got voted in with 100% of the votes cast… and I also won an open seat on the school board as a write-in candidate with 19 votes; and I lost an election to the Select Board (our ‘mayoral’ system is a 3-person board) by just 38 votes out of 450 cast.
So now I’m solving library problems on the one hand, and solving school board problems on the other hand. It’s an education in educational policy and finance — federal and state aid programs, local policy on athletics and sports and core education vs arts funding, union negotiations, and more. If I ever decide to run for select board again, I’m going to be much better informed and prepared to understand the issues.
Meanwhile…
Just yesterday, I drove through a town of 65,000 people. There was a group of people on a street corner holding up “pro labor” signs and “free Palestine” signs and “anti-war” signs, and “Jill Stein for President” (mind you, this is March 2025 – there isn’t a presidential election until 2028!) and “The Green Party wants your vote!” signs. There were maybe ten of these folks?
So when I got home, I went to their city’s “Boards and Commissions” website. They have 19 vacant seats on various committees and boards and commissions, including two (the Wetlands Commission [wouldn’t that be a Green Party issue??], and the Diversity Commission) that don’t have enough members right now to hold meetings under state quorum rules. And there are 85 people on other commissions and boards that are up for re-election this year, and more than half of them don’t want to keep running for these seats; they’d welcome a challenger.
In other words, the local community is STARVING for people to fill local government responsibilities.
Why are these people out here holding up signs for a woman to run for president in three years, when there are 104 seats in their own community government that are up election this year? Demonstrate to someone, somebody, anybody that you want to help solve community-level problems, and that you know what you’re doing… and there’s no holding you back.
This is why I’m so irritated by posts about how “the Democratic Party is shutting out progressives!!” Like — have you tried going to events? Volunteering your time? Fucking talking to people?
I’ve been on my HOA board and lemme tell you, it’s a thankless task. Yeah, there are assholes who want to fine their neighbors for having the wrong color of curtains, but there are also people who just want to take care of issues in our community. And JESUS the residents automatically hated us. Yelled, threatened physical harm, tried to sue us…but none of them wanted to actually join the board. It’s open to everyone! But no one else wanted to do it. They just wanted to rage against the machine, not do anything helpful.
To be fair, the single best thing a HOA can do is dissolve itself.
Please explain how a condo complex, where we all live in the same building that requires upkeep such as the roof, would make these kinds of repairs without the agreement of an HOA.
I joined the board specifically because the balcony decks were rotting. It was a huge issue that affected the entire building: being as we were all in the same building with the same exterior cladding, we couldn’t all just individually pay to fix our own balconies, it was a systemic issue of the entire building. It required that we get one huge loan, managed by the HOA, then take off the exterior cladding not just for that side of the building but three sides. Once we did so we realized that the original construction company hadn’t put in waterproofing…….IN OREGON.
Please do explain how we should or could have handled without the framework of an HOA.
And like, this is such a perfect example of people condemning a community organization that is open to everyone!
I see people on here declaring that HOAs are universally racist or have problematic histories and I’m like, “Yeah, so do unions!” The union movement in the U.S. was literally started because white workers didn’t like Black workers sharing the same benefits as them!
That doesn’t mean these community-based organizations aren’t open to change and open to your fucking participation!
If you don’t like how your union is run, PARTICIPATE.
If you don’t like how your HOA is run, PARTICIPATE.
If you don’t like how your HOA is run, PARTICIPATE.
Saying that the best thing a local, community organization can do is dissolve makes you sound like a libertarian. I thought this was the communist website, guys, come the fuck on.
As someone who spent the last two years organizing a public sector union, please for the love of god get involved. I’m not even joking. We had people angry at us for not being able to something when nobody had ever talked about it with us. Or people who opposed a union because they didn’t like the contracts agreed to in a different county. Which, again, could all have been resolved and avoided if people actually got involved and stopped just expecting things to happen for them.
It is genuinely fascinating how many feminist cis women, including those who are on paper openly supportive of trans people, struggle to actually think about trans men as a concept.
A few months ago I ended up having a very long talk with a friend of a friend. She told me that she’d never really spoken to a trans man before, the only trans people she knew were trans women. There was a point, after the third time I reminded her that I was a man, that she just sorta of slotted me into her mental box of “man”, and I could tell that happened because after that point she started trying to explain things to me as if I was a cis man.
I categorically do not “pass” and likely never will. I’m very short, my hips are prominent because I’m fat, I keep my hair long, charitably I could be said to have a baby face, I have D-cups and cannot bind due to spinal problems. To the majority of cis people I do not “look like a man”.
But for the rest of the conversation I had with this friend of a friend I had to keep reminding her of how other people are going to view me, because there was no room in her mental idea of “man” for a man who is not treated as one. This was not malicious on her part, she was very nice to me, and I believe her when she says she wants to support trans people. I do not think she was lying when she told me how horrified she was to learn about how her trans woman friends were treated.
She said she was envious of me going out alone and how I need to understand that’s a facet of male privilege and I asked her to look at me and explain why I’d be any safer. She was shocked to learn that I’ve been catcalled, been assaulted, that I regularly get spoken down to by cis men, shocked to learn I don’t have a single transmasc friend who hasn’t. She couldn’t understand that I’m going to be treated the same by misogynists as any fat cis woman who doesn’t wear makeup. There was no room in her feminism for trans men, because there was no room in her understanding of gender for men who are not cis.
We ended up talking about politics. She told me she was terrified of abortion being banned, and that this would never be a threat if men could get pregnant.
This is so vague I love it. The voices you are hearing are real, god is speaking to you. The nation of France needs you. Don your armor, take up arms, lead the French army. This is your destiny, joan. When the flames come for you let them lick your bones and laugh.
the rich =/= someone who has something I can’t afford :(
the rich = the fucking rich
At this point “eat the rich” has become less about the inherent immorality of being a billionaire and has turned into “they have money and I don’t like them”.
Damn guys. I thought we were mad about worker exploitation and tax evasion, not guys who can now afford Teslas.
growing up, my dad made a point to distinguish between “the rich” and “the wealthy” and a mildly confusing thing to me is that “eat the rich” has always really meant “eat the wealthy.”
rich people have lots of money. they have a mcmansion, they send their kids to college without debt, they vacation somewhere overseas every year, but they work. these are your brain surgeons. lawyers who own their own practice and are absolutely rolling in it, A-list actors and other celebrity entertainers. but because they work and are reliant on income, unforeseen things can absolutely ruin their lives. in america, particularly, a sudden need for expensive healthcare can be life-changing. rich people are millionaires on the high end, and making six figs on the low end.
wealthy people have lots of money because they own things. they do not work. they can get away with absolutely anything under the sun. wealthy people are billionaires.
if you can’t distinguish between these two groups, you will continue to fall for going after the rich.
This is the problem with thinking in binaries, in black-and-white. You have only two categories to sort people into.
You’re either poor or rich
You’re either young or old
You’re either a woman or a man
You’re either white or a person of color
(I could make the list much longer, but you get my point)
And then you decide that one of those categories is good, and the other is bad. So depending on which group you’re sorted into, you’re now also assigned a value:
You’re either an oppressor or oppressed
You’re either a victim or an offender
You’re either deserving or undeserving
You’re either a legitimate target or untouchable
People yelling “eat the rich” at anyone who isn’t teetering on the brink of poverty, is just one of the many manifestations of this thinking.
Its been so weird to me understanding class dynamics here in the UK because people say “middle class” to mean, like, Ivo Graham level posh with family money and the rich are who the middle class mocks for being crazy wealthy.
In the states middle class often meant you weren’t on reduced price lunch.
“eat the rich” is meant to be the people who make hundreds of dollars every second by just sitting there, it’s so skewed because in the US having emergency healthcare and food is something you only get if you have family money or double income no kids so it gets perceived as some sort of privilege. Babes, it’s not a privilege to get your life saved and it’s not a privilege to be able to afford meals and it’s not a privilege to take 2 weeks holiday off work… It’s a human right you’re being denied.
In the states middle
class often meant you weren’t
on reduced price lunch.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
“The blue-ringed octopus, despite its small size, carries enough venom to kill twenty-six adult humans within minutes. Their bites are tiny and often painless, with many victims not realizing they have been envenomated until respiratory depression and paralysis start to set in.[8] No blue-ringed octopus antivenom is available yet, making it one of the deadliest reef inhabitants in the ocean.”
Holy shit
And this is why I don’t go in the ocean anymore
Also the blue rings literally only show up when it is distressed so this person has angered it!!! You are in danger friend!!!
Actually this guy keeps them as pets they’re on his instagram (william_exotique) and he frequently holds then and I just? Don’t know why? And also every picture or video he posts of them shows the blue rings so they’re always in distress I just do not understand why he’s doing this
I mean OP pretty much covered it. A blue ringed octopus is almost on the level of CONE SNAIL on the list of things you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT PICK UP UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
But ask and you shall receive, On this episode of “Fun Facts With Cuckoo,” DEAD. YOU’RE DEAD. EVERYTHING IS DEAD AND YOU SHOULD NEVER TOUCH ANYTHING IN THE OCEAN EVER AGAIN.
There are many things that will kill you.
[citation needed]
There are fewer, but still many things that will kill you FAST.
There are yet fewer things that kill you fast and by such an overwhelming margin of overkill that nervous laughter is our only solace in the dark of this terrible, surprisingly Lovecraftian world of unearthly horrors that we live in.
Of the things that I know about which will kill you fast via just plain insultingly potent venom, which is a not insignificant number of things because I know a not insignificant number of things, there are about 3 things in the ocean – IN THE WHOLE OCEAN – which are so insanely, mind-bogglingly deadly that there is pretty much no possible hope for survival (I mean you CAN, but god help you if you’re ever in that situation, because god’s just about damn near the only thing that CAN help you). THE. WHOLE. OCEAN.
Those three things are the Irukandji (a tiny (1cm) species of box jellyfish, which has stingers not only on its tentacles but on its BELL, for reasons no one has definitively figured out, and is so toxic despite its size its sting can cause a severe brain hemorrhage), the cone snail (a group of carnivorous sea snails that is accepted to be the most venomous animals on earth, with a STUPIDLY fast acting and extremely powerful neurotoxin that has in at least one case killed a human ALMOST INSTANTANEOUSLY, because the swimmer who found two beautiful shells (unfortunately cone snails tend to have very pretty shells which makes people want to pick them up) was holding them up for a picture and ended up being stabbed in the neck by not one but TWO cone snails at the same time, and it is believed that she was literally dead before she hit the ground, I mean LITERALLY in a 100% non-fictional and non-exaggerated way, in between the time the two cone snails stabbed her and the time her limp body hit the sand, she was not alive anymore), and the blue ringed octopus.
It is POSSIBLE to survive any of these. But not without immediate medical attention. Of these three, the Irukandji is by far the most treatable, because Australia and other coastal regions (including Florida and other parts of the US) are kind of experienced in dealing with box jellyfish.
The blue ringed octopus will fucking kill you. There’s no antidote for their venom, ONE COMPONENT OF WHICH (tetrodotoxin) is 1200 times deadlier than cyanide. It’s a powerful neurotoxin (most of the worst venoms are because the species that produce them need to kill or at least paralyze their prey quickly, like jellyfish whose fragile tentacles could be damaged if their food doesn’t stop struggling) that attacks the sodium channels and causes muscle paralysis. It doesn’t necessarily kill you quickly. It PARALYZES you quickly, so that you can’t really call for help or describe the problem, and you will probably end up slowly suffocating from a paralyzed diaphragm. Tetrodotoxin can be metabolized by the body in a matter of hours, but it can also kill you in a matter of minutes if you get a lethal dose (which isn’t much, the
LD50
or median lethal dose, the dose at which you have a 50% chance of survival, is only 8 MICROGRAMS per kilogram of body weight (as tested in mice)). This is, by venom standards, not a large amount, which means the animal that is capable of putting this venom inside your body is very very good at killing the absolute shit out of you.
DON’T TOUCH THE BLUE RINGED OCTOPUS.
Now, because overkill is my motto, let me briefly explain why Conus geographus is the undisputed champion of YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE, AND FURTHERMORE FUCK YOU FOR THINKING OTHERWISE.
A cone snail walks into a bar. You’d expect the bartender to ask, “what’s your poison,” but they were paralyzed before they could ask and OH LOOK they’re already FUCKING DEAD ON THE GROUND.
Conus geographus is about 4-6 inches long and nature’s equivalent of Avada Kedavra. Cone snails literally have their own KIND of toxins named after them: conotoxin. Not only is there no antidote, but their venom AGGRESSIVELY RESISTS our ability to find a cure, because we barely understand how it works AND conotoxins are so internally varied, even within a single species, that any one antidote isn’t going to help because they’re constantly mutating and evolving their venom to prevent their prey from evolving a resistance to it. Plus their venom is like, a bunch of different venoms all at once JUST IN CASE any one of them wasn’t good enough.
I want you to read these two sentences from the wiki page on conotoxin:
“Conotoxins have a variety of mechanisms of actions, most of which have not been determined.”
Remember how the
LD50 of tetrodotoxin is 8μg/kg? Conotoxin is 160 times more potent. FIFTY NANOGRAMS PER KILOGRAM HAS A 50% CHANCE OF KILLING YOU. A 220-POUND HUMAN HAS A 50% CHANCE OF SURVIVAL AGAINST JUST 5 MICROGRAMS OF CONOTOXIN.
I DID SOME MATH.
IT WOULD TAKE 7-9 MILLIGRAMS OF CONOTOXIN TO KILL A BLUE WHALE, THE HEAVIEST ANIMAL TO EVER LIVE. (based on weight estimates from 300-400,000 lbs.)
Conus geographus is so fucking deadly that “In two cases of envenomation, only 0.0002-0.0005 mg resulted in severe paralysis.”
THIS THING KILLS STUFF SO HARD THAT BEFORE YOU HEAR THE FIRST “MORTAL KOMBAT” IN THE MORTAL KOMBAT THEME, THERE’S PROBABLY ALREADY BEEN A FATALITY.
And guess what? Cone snails don’t do that NOOB SHIT with the superficial biting or stinging. Your wetsuit or gloves won’t protect you. Because homeboy didn’t bring teeth to evolution’s knife fight. Oh no. It brought a motherfucking radula POISON HARPOON. It’s lightning fast and has way more piercing power than some silly little cnidocytes or salivary bacteria.
Another component of their venom is being researched for its potential as a pain reliever. “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT????” you might reasonably ask. And you would be right to do so, because science has gone too far and has surely sinned against the very image of Mollusca Kedavra. Well, it turns out the answer is “Research shows that certain component proteins of the venom target specific human pain receptors and can be up to 10,000 times more potent than morphine without morphine’s addictive properties and side-effects.” That’s right, the part of their venom that SPECIFICALLY DOESN’T HURT YOU is up to 10,000 times more potent than morphine.
Also, Conus geographus (along with one other cone snail species, C. tulipa) is the only known non-human animal to weaponize insulin. In addition to the normal insulin that the snails produce for their own use, their bodies manufacture an ADDITIONAL insulin molecule that is similar to the kind produced in fish (which they eat) for the sole purpose of stunning their prey through hypoglycemic shock. BECAUSE APPARENTLY THEY DON’T FEEL LIKE THEY’D KILL YOU HARD ENOUGH OTHERWISE.
IF you are going to survive the ALMIGHTY CONE SNAIL, WHO KNOWS NO FEAR, TRIUMPHANT HEDGEMON OF THE MOLECULAR ARMS RACE, TRUE BORN HEIR TO THE SCYTHE OF DEATH ITSELF, FISHSLAYER, GOD AMONG MOLLUSKS, WHOSE WRATH IS MERCIFUL ONLY IN ITS BREVITY, ADMIRABLE IN ITS BEAUTY AND UNSULLIED BY THE UNWORTHY TOUCH OF MORTAL HANDS OR SCALES OR REALLY ANYTHING IN RANGE OF ITS RADULA HARPOON, then literally the only thing that’s going to save you is for you to be kept alive artificially (externalizing your respiratory functions to force your body to continue breathing, basically) until the effects of the venom wear off. And because of how quickly this venom acts, you need to get that medical attention VERY, VERY FAST.
And if you don’t get it, you will still be conscious while the paralysis slowly suffocates you to death.
Don’t touch the pretty shells.
Please write a whole book.
I went to look at this guys instagram and he basically says that he has no fear of death (because he is already dying- I think he has a form of liver cancer but im not sure) : i read in the comments that the ones he has either 1) used up all their venom (i dont know how true a claim like that is but i know very little about the species) and 2) he lets them climb on him at their own pace and therefore dont feel threatened but idk kids dont touch them leave them be and dont be this guy.
That’s nonsense.
They can’t “use up” their venom. Tetrodotoxin is actually produced by bacteria that live in their salivary glands in a symbiotic relationship (which is why tetrodotoxin is such a common type of poison among a wide variety of unrelated organisms, including pufferfish, snails, newts, frogs, sea squirts, flat worms, and more). It is so potent that a bite may not even be required; it may be possible for prolonged contact to produce symptoms just from being absorbed through the skin. It may even be so potent that it can be spread through the water. (Source) The Blue Ringed Octopus has exceptionally dense colonies of these bacteria living in special glands. It provides a safe environment for them, they produce the best means of self defense the octopus could ever ask for.
It may be possible, through careful and limited exposure over a prolonged period of time, that the person who handles these could have developed antibodies to the toxin, as with any other type of venom (except probably cone snails, because conotoxin is BULLSHIT and attacks nearly every part of the nerve cell at once and would therefore require an unbelievable variety of antibodies that, frankly, would never have time to be produced because the lethal dose for the venom is so tiny that it would be virtually impossible to develop a resistance to it).
In fact, that’s how antidotes to venom are manufactured: you introduce a non-lethal dose into the bloodstream and let the body recover naturally. Do this repeatedly over time, with increasing exposure, and the body will eventually just have antibodies for that toxin to the point that it would take far more than a typical dose to be lethal. I’m not sure off the top of my head, but I think this is usually done (at least with snake venom) on horses, because horses are much larger than humans and can therefore be exposed to more venom more safely more quickly and then produce enough antibodies that they can be extracted and used medically.
With something as deadly as tetrodotoxin, that would be a hard resistance to develop naturally. It’s theoretically possible, especially if you were very careful and very slow in how much exposure you had (e.g. by exposing yourself to the water that contains those salivary bacteria long before you ever touched the octopus directly), but still … strongly strongly discouraged.
And never in a million years do this with a cone snail because you would need 50 different kinds of antibodies (more likely an UNDERSTATEMENT than an exaggeration, at least with C. geographus) that you would probably never be able to develop because there’s almost no dose of conotoxin that you can safely expose yourself to.
And at any rate, if his instagram is not making ABUNDANTLY CLEAR on every single picture that this should NEVER be attempted, then he’s being extremely irresponsible not just with his own life, but with everyone else who is viewing the pictures without proper education.
Also, there’s no way that can be safe because the blue rings on a blue ringed octopus are a threat display. If you can see the blue rings, it does not feel comfortable. This is very unsafe animal handling and I will not stand for it.
The rings do get MUCH brighter than that, though. They basically GLOW blue and, unfortunately for the humans who then want to pick them up, they are very pretty animals:
TL;DR the Blue Ringed Octopus is proof that evolution has utterly failed to give humans the correct response to brightly colored animals. Bright colors mean stay away, not ooh it’s pretty and I need to touch it.
Do not touch the brightly colored animals.
This is the most fascinating thing I’ve read all week. . @thebyrchentwigges - relevant to your interests!
As someone from the rural south, I actually don’t mind evil Republican Californian transplants. It’s kind of funny to witness them crash out after realizing there are no sidewalks and the nearest hospital is an hour and a half away. Maybe if enough of them vacate the state, the cost of living will go down and I can move there.
I used to live in an area that was somewhat scenic and had an undercurrent of tourism but was still extremely rural and poor. It was so funny to see transplants in the regional Facebook group making posts like “Does anyone know any good jogging paths in the area?” only to be met with a unanimous “No.”
There was someone who was like “I’m thinking of retiring to [AREA]. How quickly could the ambulance reach [AREA] in an emergency?” and everyone was like “It would take an hour or more. Do not retire here if you plan on ever getting sick.”
The funniest part was that the locals were not being dicks, there was a huge culture shock from these people who had lived in wealthy urban/suburban areas and were now trying to survive in the middle of nowhere. If you wanted resources and things to do and a decent quality of life, you should have stayed where you were. We’re living the libertarian unpaved road no emergency services dream over here.
“Does anybody know of any good restaurants in the area?” “There are two. Two restaurants in a 50 mile radius. One is pretty good but it is only open on Wednesdays and Fridays. The other is fucking disgusting but it is cheap and always open. Hope this helps.”
Or they move here but they don’t want to live without those amenities and bothered asking their real estate agent about it, so they do move to the city, or just outside the city, and are horrified and disgusted to learn that the cities are fucking blue, and full of immigrants and nonwhite people and you sometimes hear languages that aren’t English.
Idjits. You don’t like it? You can go back where you came from. Around here a lot of the time it’s technically that the border crossed my neighbors, rather than vice versa.
My ex moved down to Texas from Massachussetts. In Mass, she’d considered herself somewhat moderate. She agreed with some conservstive positions.
Then she got down here. And encountered Texas conservatives. And just… veered HARD left. Just “Oh, no, fuck these assholes.”
I really hate that we let the fucking tea party alt-right neofash get away with calling themselves conservatives, because the old coalition of “Texas conservatives” aren’t into 98% of what this administration’s up to, and could be a useful component of a resistance coalition, but a lot of them don’t know it because part of the conservative identity is hating politics and wanting to have as little to do with it as possible, especially when anyone they don’t like is in power (which might surprise people but includes TFG.) In other words they act a lot like liberals. They’re not reliable, but they’re useful.
Texas went for this regime at a rate 10% less than the national average, and driving a wedge between conservatism and this - big government overreach, even tyranny - would be enough to split the GOP here. But we’d get further if we stopped lumping them together from the left.
my dad has this crazy ass huge camera lens so we went out during the eclipse last night and got maybe one of my favorite photos i’ve ever had a hand in taking
my little brother tried to show me a “cool trick” where he entered my name and hometown into chatgpt and tried to get it to pull up my personal info like it did on all of his friends, then was absolutely shocked when it couldn’t find anything on me
so. keep practicing basic internet safety, guys. it still works. don’t put your personal info on social media, keep all your accounts on private, turn off ai scraping on every site that you can, enable all privacy features on social media apps. our info still can be protected, we have to keep fighting for control
Hey y'all in the notes, typing your personal info into google/chatGPT to “check” whether its been leaked online somewhere counts as leaking it online somewhere, hope this helps!
I’m doing a periodic maintenance task for work, where I have to rebuild the container environment that our materials science computations get run in to update the versions of some software that we use, and I’m struck by just how much scientific knowledge is packed into this singularity image file that represents the container.
It takes like an hour to compile on modern hardware, from an Ubuntu (ha! the built in spell check in Ubuntu insists on capitalizing itself) base image with dozens of computational materials science simulation packages and supporting dependencies. These all have to be downloaded, compiled, linked, and installed in such a way that they can mutually interface, and take data and return results in the formats we use.
Once the whole thing is built, the final image is something like a gigabyte in size–5x that if we also install CUDA. I know that 1 Gb doesn’t sound like that much data these days, some internet connections can download that in less than a second, but think about it:
This isn’t a move or an image or a song. This archive contains almost no actual data. That gigabyte of space is pretty much entirely code instead; much of it compiled, executable code at that.
A gigabyte of materials science simulation Code, a billion characters worth of instructions, specifying the very best established practices for modeling the behavior of materials at the atomic level.
I know the digital age is old news, but I can’t get over that level of cumulative effort. It represents tens of thousands of person-months of effort collectively, but I’m just sitting here watching my computer assemble it from a recipe that’s short enough for me to read and sensibly edit, and distill that down into a finely-tuned piece of precision apparatus that fits on a flash drive.
And that isn’t even the important part of our research! That’s just all the shit we need installed on the system as background dependencies to be able to run our custom simulation code on top of that! Its so complex that at this point, its easier to run an entire (limited) virtual machine with our stuff installed in it than to try and convince every supercomputer cluster we work with to install every package separately and keep up with updates.
In case you’re wondering what a day in the life of a computational materials physicist looks like: trying to do upgrades on incredibly complex machinery that you cannot touch or see. At least this time it doesn’t also have to stay running while I do it…
REMINDER: luigi mangione has been accused of killing the CEO, not convicted, and the evidence presented is extremely questionable. luigi mangione is NOT the claims adjuster until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law, and the widespread presumption of his guilt makes it much more likely he will be falsely convicted.
