Extrusive Thoughts

This paper intended to test whether would mice would run on a wheel if they found one, to try and determine if this was a natural behavior or a stress response in captivity. They put a wheel in a protected little box with a camera that took pictures any time the wheel turned, and tallied up how often it was used by what.

Mice were, happily, the most common users of the wheel, and their patterns of use indicated they were doing so voluntarily once they figured it out.

But the second most common users.

Those were slugs.

this is kind of just not true though. like that's obviously the idea behind it but it does not actually work that way in execution, which is suuuper important. i think that witch hat atelier goes pretty significantly out of its way with richeh, rili, and euini to show that masters actually Don't need to put in any amount of effort, and in fact can be actively abusive, while their apprentices still feel obliged to stay with them for reasons beyond 'i'm not allowed to leave'.

like here's the scene from the manga where qifrey talks to euini about this

im sad this interaction got cut from the anime because its soooooo so important... it establishes that the power dynamic between adults and children is such that the child still feels obliged to live and behave by the terms their guardian sets for them, and they're still going to be internalizing everything that is said to and about them by their authority figure. and then there's the fact that On Paper the policy of apprentices choosing their master means any child being subjected to this kind of emotional abuse is doing so "willingly", which provides a structural barrier to actually addressing that abuse, because the adults who do notice and care do not have any formal grounds on which to intervene.

Digital painting of the giant planet Jupiter as it may have appeared in the 1880s or so in approximately true color. This was based on a number of sources from the 1880s and 1890s, and is sort of a hybridized view of about a decade or two of Jovian sketches and early photography.

At this time, the famous planet-sized hurricane, the Great Red Spot, was a few decades old and very very large. It has been shrinking ever since then, and is now less than a third of the size it was in the 1880s.

More details and image variants below the cut:

my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.

the truth is actually weirder

she’s aware dandelions look like this

she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions

she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?

gosh I enjoy this website

The PANC movement is a latin-american based botanical movement (started out in Brazil) focused on researching and cataloguing non-conventional edible plants, and man. There are so many straight up ornamental plants that just. are edible. you can eat them. you can grab a daylily and eat it. You can grab a begonia and eat it. Hibiscus, lavender, dandelions. And those are just the flowers. So many little herbs out there that are fully edible (Shout out to lamb's ear, that one tastes really nice imo).

Like straight up there is free food out there. foraging is so cool but it's so hard to find actual sources not made by either some AI fucker that's gonna end up killing you or by some crunchy "eating grass will cure your cancer" influencer. PANC is made by actual scientists that specialized in botany that have fully researched and found out that These Plants Are Fully Safe to Eat.

And not only that, but they're legitimizing native knowledge. They're taking the plants that our native populations have been eating for centuries and are proving, in a lab, that yeah, these plants ARE safe to eat - which is incredible. It might sound stupid (like ooo NOW you're willing to believe the native people) but this is so, so important, because having ACTUAL SCIENTIFIC PROOF of their knowledge is a way to combat the still pervasive idea that natives are "stupid savages", or that their traditions are just "wacky spirituality nonsense".

Oh, the name of the largest scale of universal understanding, how the walls/filaments (tldr long string-clusters of galaxies that surround massive voids) is the cosmic web? Interesting!

Like look at this shit - “The universe within 1 billion light-years (307 Mpc) of Earth, showing local superclusters forming filaments and voids”

And this was not unusual for feminist groups at that time. There was a sense that we were close to the end of a century-long struggle to desegregate society: Universities and most schools were now mixed (my own former school had just become co-ed at this point), youth groups like the Scout Association had recently made it mandatory for all groups to admit girls, there was growing public pressure on men-only spaces like The Garrick Club to admit women, most modern swimming pools had co-ed changing facilities, and gender-neutral bathrooms were starting to become more common.

One of our campaigns was to make all bathrooms in the Students' Union building gender neutral. In the end this failed because of pressure from a group of (white, wealthy, English) men in the Conservative society who insisted that sharing bathrooms with women violated their devout Christian beliefs - they weren't even Christian actually but they managed to spook the lawyers enough in light of the recent Equality Act.

We also frequently discussed desegregating sports - it was widely understood by our (pretty much entirely cis women) members that sex-segregation was a misogynist project that resulted principally in women being paid less. The long mission to get equal prize money at Wimbledon had been won only a few years earlier, and there was pressure on other sports to follow suit. Now we were discussing introducing mixed-gender University sports teams to play competitively.

Bear in mind that the issue of trans women basically never came up in these discussions (mainly due to ignorance: the only reference to trans women I had ever encountered at this point was Ace Ventura). It was principally a matter of desegregation as a moral position that positioned the logic of segregation as part of the systemic oppression of women. The fact that it was right-wing men who were the ones objecting to desegregated toilets (something that has been true throughout the history of toilet segregation) just solidified this point.

Anyway, I gave all this as context to my trans guy friend to explain why I felt frustrated at recent attempts to paint bathroom bans as a win for feminism. That it's depressing to see the feminist activism of 15 years ago sacrificed on the altar of transmisogyny.

This guy has been medically transitioning for a little over a year, and has been discovering feminism in that time too. He recently learned about things like the gender pay gap, and will try to explain it to me like he thinks it's news to me. The gendered nature of domestic abuse is also a favourite topic of his. Before he transitioned, back when he referred to himself as a woman, he tended to take a more liberal normie "men and women are equally oppressed by gender expectations, just let everyone do what they want" line, but tbf we didn't talk about feminism much back then anyway.

The combination of being an early-transition trans guy who is also learning baby's first feminism can be a really dangerous one. He is only now discovering how much he has suffered at the hands of this form of oppression called "misogyny", but at the same time he is a man. He is reading all this literature that positions "men" as the oppressor but also positions people like himself as the oppressed. The easiest way for him to resolve this conflict is to mentally transpose "men" with "AMABs" and "women" with "AFABs", even if he's not aware that's what's happening in his brain.

So in response to my frustration with bathroom bans he starts saying all this stuff about women's reasonable concerns about male violence, how it's difficult to balance the various needs of different groups, how trans men are "obviously" not a threat to women so they should clearly be allowed to use women's toilets. He views the existence of trans women as a spanner in the works of an otherwise rational system with cis men on one side and AFABs on the other.

I try to point out that toilet segregation is actually a real concrete problem for me, the flesh-and-blood person in front of him who he has been friends with for years. That I am risking violence no matter which toilet I use, no matter what clothes I'm in, no matter whether I'm wearing make-up or not. If I use the women's I will get harassed for sure. If I use the men's I have a high chance of being assaulted. His only response is that he also is nervous about using the women's because after a year on T he already passes for cis in nearly all situations. The idea that he should just use the men's since he's a man who looks like a man gets a blank look from him: why should he not be able to use the women's, he's experienced "AFAB oppression" too, hasn't he?

By this point I'm getting quite frustrated. We're talking about feminism as a leftwing movement and I bring up the kind of socialist guy we all know well who says stuff like "misogyny isn't really a priority for me". He hasn't really been listening but he hears me quote this hypothetical man and assumes I'm saying it in earnest. "Did you say misogyny isnt a priority for you?"

Suddenly I, the woman who has been involved in feminist activism for 15 years, am having to defend myself against accusations of misogynist bigotry from a man who discovered feminism a year ago because he decided to not bother listening to what a woman was saying until it was something that sounded incriminating as a soundbite.