A box of personal things

So I'll do the rant again, and he'll listen to it like it's his first time hearing it, and he'll ask the best questions because he's been hearing this rant for 19 years, you can bet your ass he knows the best questions, and it's... beautiful. The words are almost adjacent to the dance.

If you want examples, some I've heard punted around are things like sabertooth tigers vs. megafauna and some weird ass newts in Yellowstone. The sabertooth theory is that they got locked in a race to eat megafauna that protected themselves with really thick skin, so their fangs get longer to counter the skin, then the skin got thicker to counter the fangs, repeat, and eventually, the skin became so thick that the megafauna couldn't cool themselves properly. Then humans figured out that they could just skip the giant fangs thing and just chase the megafauna until they had heat strokes. Badaboom, now the megafauna and saberteeth are both extinct. The newt example is that there are some newts in Yellowstone that have absurdly high level of tetrodotoxin in their skin. Like, hundreds of times the lethal dose for a human. But! They're preyed upon by birds that have evolved limited immunity to tetrodotoxin. So the newts are stuck always trying to become more toxic, and the birds are stuck always trying to become more immune, and they sit at this uneasy level where the birds can't gorge themselves entirely on newts because then they'll die, but they can eat enough newts that it keeps the newt population down, and neither really has enough evolutionary wiggle room to adapt to their environment in any new ways besides becoming more poisonous and more poison immune. So it's almost like they're not really evolving to adapt to their environment, they're mostly just evolving to adapt to each other, and that means that one day the environment will kill them.

This scene is right after the Benbow gets burned down, and Jim is noticeably shorter than his mom here (and if you look carefully it's not because he's slouching, he's standing relatively straight up here (also good lord how tall is Doppler???))

But then in this scene after the journey when he reunites with his mom, even though he's leaned down a little bit for a hug they look like they're about the same height

With anything inflatable (material operating under tension) you want the thing to be ideally spherical/round. Since a mattress can't be, you round the corners and introduce these dimples that turn every row and column into a cylinder distributing the forces of your weight more evenly across the large surface. I've even owned one inflatable mattress that actually looked like multiple tubes connected side to side. This is just the "grid" version of that.

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.

And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.

And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.

Winter

Spring

Summer