hello

A young child, using words she learned purely by mimicking the way others speak: I want to be a mommy when I grow up.

Other mammals are instincts with some learning thrown on top, but humans are basically only learning, with some residual instincts to make sure we don’t fuck up too bad. That’s one of the reasons why humans take so much longer to develop motor skills than other species, because our brain has usurped the typical mammalian in-born neural motor programming with a blank slate that has to just like … figure that shit out on it’s own. Human babies can’t even see properly when they’re first born, even though they have perfectly functioning eyes, because our brain replaced all that silly mammalian visual recognition software with the neurological equivalent of a blank sheet of paper, a pencil, a shrug, and “you’ll figure it out, go get ‘em tiger”.

And that’s a huge advantage! Evolution can only adapt a species really, really slowly, to changing conditions over millions of years. Typical mammalian neocortices are a fantastic patch on that which allow adaptation over the course of a creature’s lifetime, but they don’t allow for that adaptation to be passed on, and it’s still just a patch on the greater impetus of evolved instincts. But humans. Ohohohoh. Humans are nothing but adaptation. Our ability to mimic and pass on behavior means that we don’t need a lot of those built up evolutionary behaviors which change so slowly, because we just can figure that shit out by mimicry and raw learning anyway. So we just ditched most of it and a lot of what’s left now comes with a “you can learn to override this if you need to” feature. It’s a way, way more flexible and adaptable system than that old clunky “being a bunch of preprogrammed mental software” thing other mammals use.

AND FUCK DRYER SHEETS LITERALLY NOBODY EVER HAS ENOUGH OF A PROBLEM WITH STATIC TO WARRANT PAYING OUT THE ASS FOR THAT SHIT

DO YOU WANT CLEAN CLOTHES? YOU DON’T EVEN NEED TO BUY FUCKING DETERGENT JUST MAKE YOUR OWN* IT’S SO GODDAMN EASY AND 80X CHEAPER

FUCK THE ENTIRE LAUNDRY INDUSTRY *Fuck The Entire Laundry Industry Recipe

1 cup Washing Soda (not Baking Soda. Different things.)

1 cup Borax (not Boric Acid. Also a different thing.)

Step one: acquire $5 bag of baking soda from Costco.

Step two: lay that motherfucking baking soda out on a baking tray.

Step three: bake the baking soda on a tray in an oven at 400° for 1 hour (to make the moisture evaporate, leaving washing soda)

And here are the British Sign Language versions. (I love the BLS sign for Halloween. It’s so cute.) 

I’ll start. 

But then! I remembered that both my parents have books from their rural Albertan communities that talk about settlers and cowboys from that area. I then opened them up and looked through them. I didn’t find anyone in my mom’s but my dad’s had 3-4 Ralphs! One dude settled in the 1900s and played the banjo lots. Another one was the son of a settler and was in the air force in WW2. The other 1-2 didn’t really stick out.