Charlie Waite

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

Crab Restaurant in Dagupan City, Philippines

It's squidtember, everybody! To celebrate, we'll discuss the vampire squid, which is... not actually a squid. It's not a vampire either. I'll let you decide which is more disappointing. No, the vampire squid isn't a squid or an octopus or even a cuttlefish, it's its own thing, the only surviving member of order Vampyromorphida, a sister group of the octopi. Let's dig into this unique cephalopod.

(Image: a vampire squid. It is an octopus-like animal a dark red in color with large eyes and a pair of fins on the mantle. The arms are relatively short and are held together. End ID)

The scientific name of the vampire squid is Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which means "vampire squid from hell". With a name like that you'd expect it to be a badass predator, but it isn't. The name comes from its red color and arm membranes that are visually similar to a cape. They're also on the small side, maxing out at around 30 cm (about 1 foot), half of which is the body and the other half being the arms. The body is mostly a dark red color. Its body plan is similar to an octopus, with eight arms. On the body is a pair of fins and while the skin is covered in bioluminescent cells called photophores, they lack the color-changing chromatophores that allow octopi, squid, and cuttlefish to change their color so radically. The eye of the vampire squid is the largest in proportion to body size of any animal and the vampire squid likely has very good vision. The vampire squid has an internal shell called a gladius that is common to cephalopods but has been lost in octopi. The galdius helps maintain buoyancy, aided by a high concentration of ammonia in the body and inner ear-like organs called statocysts.

(Image: a vampire squid with its arms extended, revealing that they are connected to each other by a membrane that reaches almost to the tips of the arms. End ID)

The arms are connected to each other by a membrane called a cloak. The inner sides of the arms are line with fleshy cirri and only have suckers at the very tips. In between the base of the arms is the beak. Also within the cloak are a pair of pouches that contain the tactile velar filaments (side note: why the fuck does Tumblr's spell check recognize velar but not cephalopod?). The filaments are very long, very slender modified arms that are covered with sensory hairs. The filaments retract back into their pouches when not in use. The filaments are used in feeding similarly to the tentacles of squid, but they are not derived from the same feature. The common ancestor of octopi and vampyromorphids had 10 arms. The octopi eventually lost a pair while the vampyromorphids modified a pair into the filaments.

(Image: a vampire squid with one of its filaments extended from within the arms. The filament looks like a long string that is hanging in the water. End ID)

The vampire squid is found worldwide in tropical and temperate latitudes at depths within the midnight zone, where no light reaches. They are extremophiles, organisms that live in extreme environments. This isn't because of being deep-sea organisms, but because of the particular part of the deep sea they are specialized to live in. Vampire squids live in oxygen minimum zones, regions of the deep sea that have drastically lower levels of dissolved oxygen that the surrounding area. Because oxygen is necessary for most life, oxygen minimum zones are very sparsely populated. To survive in such a low-oxygen environment, vampire squids have developed a very low metabolic rate (the lowest of all deep-sea cephalopods) and have very large gills. This allows them to extract every possible bit of oxygen from the water and let it last for a long time. The squid spend their time slowly swimming using their fins for propulsion, keeping movement to a minimum to reduce oxygen use. Food is scarce in the oxygen minimum zones and the vampire squids have adopted a low-energy feeding method. The eyes and velar filaments search through the water for bits of food, which the arms catch. The squid uses a mix of mucus and bodily waste excreted from the suckers to encase the food, forming a lovely mucus dumpling that the squid eats. The bioluminescence may also be used to attract prey. A vampire squid's diet consists largely of marine snow, bits of organic matter that falls from above. Marine snow largely consists of bits of dead animals, but a lot of it is also feces. The vampire squid form hell eats poop. Vampoo-er squid. It also eats zooplankton and maybe small fish, but that's less scandalous

(Image: a vampire squid showing off the inside of its cloak. Each arm is lined with fleshy protrusions called cirri. At the center of the arms in a lump of flesh covering the beak. End ID)

Vampire squids can't afford to spend energy on fighting predators, so they have adapted some unique defense mechanisms. The red coloration is one of these. Red light is the first wavelength of visible light to be filtered out in water and as a result, many deep-sea animals can't see red light. To them, a vampire squid would seem invisible. The first defense mechanism vampire squids use is the pineapple pose, where they wrap their arms and cloak around their bodies to look like a spiky ball. If that doesn't deter predators, the squid can release sticky, glowing mucus from its suckers. This mucus can disorient the predator and will stick to it, making it vulnerable to predators of its own. While making an escape, the squid will use its bioluminescence to disorient the predator, especially flailing its glowing arms to create a very confusing sight. It can regrow the ends of its arms, making them an acceptable sacrifice if it means surviving the encounter.

(Image: a vampire squid in the pineapple pose. Its arms and cloak are covering its body, exposing the cirri. This makes it look like a round object lined with rows of spines. End ID)

Like its octopus relatives, the vampire squid reproduces via the male inserting a packet of sperm into a hole in the female's mantle. The female can store the sperm for long periods of time until she is ready to use it. They may also be able to use only part of the sperm supply at a time while reserving the rest. While squid, cuttlefish, and octopi only mate once before dying, vampire squid appear to mate multiple times in their lives. Eggs may take over a year to hatch and the juveniles are born as 8-mm miniature versions of the adults. The juveniles live in deeper water than the adults and survive on an internal yolk sac for some time after hatching. Curiously, the juveniles are born with a single pair of fins, then grow another pair as they mature. Eventually the original pair of fins is lost and the new pair will chance shape and placement during maturation. This has led to vampire squids of different development stages being misidentified as different species in the past.

(Image: a juvenile vampire squid. It's arms are shorter and it has two pairs of fins. End ID)

Vampire squid are classified as data deficient by the IUCN, meaning there is not enough data to determine what conservation needs they have. Their worldwide distribution indicates they are likely not at risk of extinction. They are believed to be vulnerable to microplastics, which drift downward like marine snow and are very likely to be mistaken for food by the squid. Microplastics can carry chemical loads that could be poisonous to the squid and can obstruct the digestive tract or trick the animal into thinking it is well-fed when it is actually full of indigestible plastic. Vampire squid are known to be prey to large fish and deep-diving marine mammal like toothed whales or seals. The vampire squid was discovered by the Valdivia Expedition of 1898-99 and was one of the animals caught that helped disprove a then-accepted hypothesis that the deep sea was lifeless. The azoic hypothesis or abyssus theory stated that ocean life diminished with depth and that, by extrapolating the existing numbers, the ocean would be lifeless below about 300 fathoms (550 m, 1,800 ft). The vampire squid was one of the earliest examples of animals captured from below that depth.

The Old Man of the Lake is a log that floats around the lake. It is somewhat strange in that it floats vertically. It's roughly 30 feet tall, with only about 5 or so feet sticking out above the surface of the water. It was first 'offically' recorded in the early 20th century, though there are oral reports of it as far back as 1896 (and likely earlier still given the cultural importance of Crater Lake to the Klamath tribe of that area.

The Old Man should have rotted away long ago or at the very least become waterlogged and sank into the water fully, but nope. Over a hundred years, and there is this log still in the water just floating.

So y'know how I said the fact that it floats vertically was 'somewhat strange'? Let's get into some actual strange territory regarding the Old Man. It moves. Against the wind. It has been recorded moving in paths that do not make sense, never getting stuck on the shore of Wizard Island, nor the area of shore around the lake. Now that's strange.

So now let's get freaky: The free-floating Old Man posed a hazard to boats since it moves, and only a small portion of it was above water. (though personal boats are no longer allowed on the lake) Anyway, in 1988 a team was using a small submersible to explore the lake. The scientist figured it'd be a good idea to moor the Old Man near the coast of Wizard Island out of their way, for safety. So they tied some rope to it, to move the Old Man. As soon as they did so, the clear blue skies of a warm August day turned dark. The wind kicked up, bad, and it started to rain, then hail, then snow in the span of a few minutes...again in August. Now snow in that area is common, but not in the summer months. It gets super warm in that area in summer (like 70 to 90 degrees on average) So the scientists decided to nope the fuck out of the water, because of this freak storm. They unmoored the Old Man, preparing to get the fuck out of dodge of this summer snowstorm. As soon as the rope loosened and was in the water, as quickly as the storm had come on them, the darkened skies cleared and it was once more a fine sunny summer day.

"The Old Man floats vertically through the lake on a calm day"

"THE OLD MAN FLOATS. VERTICALLY. THROUGH THE LAKE ON A CALM DAY"

Over time it grew in self awareness and picked up a little magic of its own. As its creators took notice they agreed to foster its mind and actively teach it spellcasting to better perform its duties. Maybe generation after generation grew up under its watch, and inevitably it evolved from mindless automaton, to faithful servant, to student, to friend and family. A dependable ally and even wise mentor, still carrying centuries of previous knowledge.

And in the end, as magical beings retreated from the world, the last trusted keeper of their legacy.

Building a home for a toadlet

Love transcends barriers 🥰