Halite

IT'S HERE IT'S OUT YOU CAN BUY IT!

this book is about what if you loved your friends so much you were willing to damn the world for them? what if you were so scared to lose them that you were willing to damn yourself?

what if you regretted it?

I’m using six colours in the piecing, which should make it 92”x109” (unless I mess with the pattern even more and take one of the rows out completely) which will technically be a king size LOL The seventh colour pink is gonna be used on the binding so I get to use alllll the colours we had in stock in the shop 🎉

Okay, blocks done and middle rows complete!

I did take one row out of the centre so there are only two red centre blocks instead of three. 109” is too big for my queen bed, but I can work with 101” LOL

Technically this will still fit a king at 92”x101”, but I am a blanket hog and that feels like a really skinny king to me.

ALSO??

Because I altered the amount of rows (downsizing) but did not alter the amount of blocks I made, I ended up with just enough left over to make two matching pillow cases! They are even on point like the quilt.

And it’s so fucking big LOL

Not as big as the greyscale king for my brother, but still. It feels big.

As you can see a little from the roll on the back of the long arm, I found a fun rainbow universe print to put on it with all the colours on the front.

I’m quilting the pillowcases too, though in a tighter pattern so they can handle more washing.

The pillow cases look so good too. As I mentioned, I quilted them much tighter than the quilt so they can be thrown in the wash a lot more. Same pattern, just smaller design.

It’s so busy, I could stare at it for hours finding things in the prints.

Also? I love the pink binding. I really did want to use every colour, so this was a nice compromise to having to resize everything LOL

The backing is also so busy LOL You can hide a lot of pet fur on both sides of this thing.

The pillowcases turned out great. I used the leftover from the backing to back the pillow cases so that everything matches. And they’re envelope style so the pillows won’t slip out. Hate it when the pillowcase slips off my pillow.

An interesting game where you are presented with 10 artifacts from the MET. You have to place where the artifact is from and what time period it is from. Each artifact scores up to 10,000 points, and you lose points the further away your guess is and how far off in time you are. You can only play once a day. Thanks to @baebeylik for showing this to me.

Today I scored really well. Yesterday ... not so much.

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"Re"-domestication of cheetahs?

With reference to This Post In ancient Egypt, Cheetahs were sometimes used as hunting animals like greyhounds, and kept as housepets by the royal family and later, many wealthy households.

Now, there's an argument about how "domesticated" these cheetahs were- the majority of them were captured from the wild as adults and tamed/trained to tolerate humans and obey hunting commands, mostly because back then and still today, cheetahs are extremely hard to breed in captivity. Some were bred and raised from cubs, and there was not a shortage of cheetahs living in and around human habitation for them to replace stock with.

Even today, cheetahs are... weirdly comfortable around humans, if those humans know how to mind their manners. Game wardens in Kruger National Park sometimes sleep next to young cheetahs they are re-introducing into the wild, or have had female cheetahs who are familiar with them drop their cubs off on their feet to 'babysit' while she goes hunting.

Here's a pair of San hunters from the Naankuse Wildlife Reserve in Namibia bow-hunting while a wild local male cheetah hangs out with them (the angle makes him look much bigger and closer to the men than he is, but he's still VERY close). The male's name is Aiko, and is well-known to these men- they're not worried about his presence because they know how to respect his space and he knows not to go after game they've downed. Game they miss is free for him to run down, and game he flushes from the bushes are much easier to shoot- a mutually beneficial partnership. It's extremely similar to how the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea hunt with their dogs, some of the most recently domesticated and most similar to ancient 'proto-dogs' alive today.

So, cheetahs aren't domesticated the way dogs and housecats are- they haven't been selectively bred for generations, they're not dependent on humans, and they can and will attack people that bother them.

But like Coyotes, the remaining cheetahs we have are VERY habituated to humans, arguably even moreso than coyotes are, and we've made a lot of progress in getting them to breed in captivity- Ironically by pairing them up with highly domesticated dogs, who teach them domesticated animal behaviors like "not worrying about everything".

With Coyotes, the obstacle to domestication are mostly practical matters like "getting a coyote farm funded, zoned, built and insured.", whereas with cheetahs the problem is "there are almost no cheetahs left to practice domestication on and the ones we do have are already inbred". There IS a lot of commercial interest in domesticated cheetahs, so I think a good way to get the funding for species conservation and genetic re-diversification of cheetahs would be to frame it as a prerequisite to "Re-Domestication" and pet cheetahs.

WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS MY FAVORITE TELEVISION SERIES OF ALL TIME (it's not out yet)

Eros GreyHeart

🐱 Transylvanian

📸 Zsolt Bereczki