plants are weird but cool

I imagine that becoming a parent was a wildly different thing in like the 70s before giving a shit was invented. Everyone just supposed that everyone's gonna do it and you just have your first at 21 after getting married at 19, let them little shits loose outside all day while your husband is at work at the Forever Chemical Pollutant Factory and you're sitting at home drunk as hell breastfeeding the baby. Your eldest Little Ronny Douglas runs in at 9 pm like "hey ma I was crawling through the ditches at the abandoned mine field three towns over and I caught this frog and my friend Donny caught tetanus" and you're just like "yeah whatever that's nice dear" and tap the ashes from your cigarette on the bald spot on top his head. You don't know why that's there but it's been there a while and you've been using it as an ashtray for a few years and it seems fine.

clearly some of you have not been to the labyrinth of pestilence deep beneath kentucky

alright so when I was a teenager I went to this bug-themed summer camp for socially stunted nerds and on the way back from it I visited the university of kentucky. I met with an entomologist there and while we were touring the department he asked "wanna see something cool?" so he took me down an elevator to what must've been a sub-sub-sub basement on a card-access only floor, and after turning several more corners we went through two sets of (I'm not even exaggerating) 12-inch thick doors, opening onto one long as fuck corridor. each side of this hallway was lined with about 50 refrigerators. and each and every single one of these refrigerators was filled with hundreds of thousands. of live. bedbugs. the very reasonable explanation for this was that they were doing research on insecticides and needed to test them on real samples, but they could not under any circumstances allow them to escape, so they had to be kept under area 51 levels of overkill containment. but reasonable or not that was very much not what I anticipated seeing that day. so yeah. I decided after that I did not want to become an entomologist

absolutely baffled to get to the end of that story and hear you decide NOT to be an entomologist but possibly that's the entomologist in me speaking

as this breaches containment it is vital to me that The People know my problem with the bedbug labyrinth was NOT the bedbugs. that was obviously sick as fuck. the problem was it dawning on me how much entomology research is anti-bug instead of pro bug. weird girl equivalent of realizing how much time veterinarians spend putting down dogs

if someone says "wanna see something cool?" and then takes you to a secret underground lair, basically anything is on the table at that point. millions of bugs? sure. why not. we're already in a scene from a Connery-era Bond film let's go all in

Anyway you DO in fact have to think about how you would respond if someone close to you got accused of something terrible*, and if your answer is "I would do nothing, because it's more important to protect my circle from harm, and it's probably not true anyway", congrats! Now you know exactly why most communities allow child and domestic abuse to fester like an open wound

Additionally, while it's important to understand the underlying reasons why some groups of people are more willing and able to commit abuse, focusing too much on identity is foolish. Adopting the stance that real abuse is only possible when one is a parent/blood relative/man/white/cis/straight etc, and only committed for a narrow range of reasons ("exerting power") is completely disconnected from reality, and simply makes it easier for you to comfortably ignore abuse that doesn't fit the model!

The thing that gets me about antisemitism is that so much of it is like, hidden under layers of innocuous (read: culturally normalized, white supremacist) imagery & conspiracy logic & when you try to explain how these things are Secretly About Jewish People it makes YOU sound like the crazy one

your life is not an optimization problem

as in you'll never achieve the perfect daily routine, sleep schedule, coping mechanisms, mannerisms, fashion sense etc. even after years and years of healing and improvement and self-discovery. you will never be so good at life that you manage to utilize every waking moment. its great to be productive and all but sometimes you'll suck ass. sometimes you'll take eight hours to be done with a twenty minute job. you'll prioritize the wrong thing. you'll sleep for 12 hrs just to avoid being awake. you'll relapse. and you'll relapse again. you'll forget to turn in the assignment. you'll order too little food. life is far too large and complex for you to even experience it completely, much less try to make sense of and control it. you can't. please give up on that and be at peace with the hours you lose. they are not separate from your life.

the first thing u need to understand about athletes is that they are cringe losers bc they skipped school in hopes of never having to work a real job. the second thing you need to understand abt athletes is that they are first and foremost workers whose years of lucrative labour are capped by the very real limit that the strain of that selfsame work puts on their bodies which means they retire at an age before most people's careers even really take off and are expected to get by for the rest of their lives on the money they earned those few years. the third thing you need to understand is that they want to fuck their coworker.

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

losing the battle with my own self-control so will briefly comment and say that categorizing certain types of ai as straightforwardly good and other types as "bad evil," even for the sake of summary, doesn't really hold water. just to give two counterexamples to the distinctions drawn above, large language models ("evil") are being used by human rights groups to parse huge datasets about police abuse while analytical ai ("helpful") is also the kind of ai that animates facial recognition software and the increasingly ubiquitous searchable license plate databases that police are using to stalk people. the goodness or badness of a given ai tool has less to do with its type and more to do with things like scale and scope, transparency, ownership, and contextual application.

common advice for social anxiety is to tell yourself "people aren't going to think less of you just because you said something a bit daft" but the thing is. sometimes they will. and you just have to learn to be cool with that and to treat it as a dnd random encounter rather than letting it ruin your whole day

once you notice half of all memes are just a picture of a black person with unrelated text over them you really cannot unsee it

if female top nudity weren't viewed as inherently sexually explicit. oh brother. I would be letting those puppies hang like you wouldn't believe

the thing is I would be okay with being viewed as sexually attractive while topless. like a shirtless cis man can be a considered a hunk beefcake eye candy etc but it's not by nature r-rated. usamerican society at large is able to understand that toplessness can be sexually appealing but is not in itself a sexual act when a man does it. if I could be just casually topless on a hot day or something without the little flashing light over my head saying think of the CHILDREN I would be getting minoan with it