Floral Bullshit

a rare closeup of a black swift, found throughout north america and small parts of south america. swifts are rarely seen up close; they spend more of their life in air than any other species of bird - they eat, drink, mate and sleep while in flight. they are incapable of perching like other birds; they must cling to vertical surfaces.

but yeah, apparently completely true.  these birds stay aloft for as much as 10 months nonstop, feed on insects, spend more energy at night (when there aren’t warm thermals to ride) and at dawn and dusk climb to 10,000 ft altitude where the 30 min slow descent is probably when they catch their sleep.

they’re unusually long-lived for such active critters (20 yrs) and they may be limiting energy expenditure by being extremely aerodynamic and narrow bodied.  Also a single bird travels the distance of about 7 roundtrip journeys to the moon in its lifetime (>3 million miles).

you pet your dog and the atoms that are you brush up against the atoms that are him, and the electrons that are you press into the electrons that are him, and both of them change their movement.

electrons of course are not really particles and do not really move.

Things can be really really ass and still incredibly enjoyable and beloved, like rocky horror picture show. Sometimes things are enjoyable BECAUSE they aren’t “good”. Hell, camp is BUILT on this concept! Like junk food, it’s bad, but it’s delicious!

Things can be “good” and just thoroughly unenjoyable or boring or whatever. Sometimes due to personal preference, sometimes on a wider scale. Sometimes well made or technically good shit is SUPPOSED to not be fun. Sometimes it’s boring on accident. A lot of people are disappointed when they see the Mona Lisa in person, because technically good or great or whatever doesn’t automatically translate to individual impact. Like how a lot of healthy things are incredibly unpleasant.

Things can be good AND fun. People can still personally not enjoy things that are widely considered to be both! Or they can still crash and burn at the last second! It’s like how sometimes things that are healthy are also tasty, but some people might have a condition that means they can’t digest it.

Sometimes things are bad and unpleasant. Just garbage with nothing redeeming whatsoever. Like GenAi, landfills, and the 2010 movie adaptation of ATLA. Kinda like how yeah, technically anything is edible at least once, but that doesn’t mean you should try eat uranium.

I think people should be more open to admitting stuff like that instead of the more common tendency to stubbornly insist everything they enjoy is good and treat it as a personal insult to imply otherwise. The internal loop some have of “If I like it, it must be because it’s good or else I wouldn’t like it! I like things because they are good and they are good because I like them because I like good things and thus it’s good because I like it” and so on is incredibly annoying.

There are objective measures of quality (to the extent objectivity even meaningfully exists at all) and there are outright blatantly 100% unquestionably subjective measures. These are not always the same AND THAT IS OK.

Some of the most widely enjoyed things in the world are, “objectively” speaking, pretty fucking “bad” and enjoyable PRECISELY because of that.

Life’s way more fun and less stressful when ya let go of the idea that enjoyable = good. (At best, it’s a correlation, not causation scenario.)

Enjoy shit. I promise that you’ll spend more time enjoying whatever shit when you let go of the idea of liking things meaning they are good because you’ll spend way less time being upset when people say anything that conflicts with that idea about whatever thing.

happy nonbinary awareness week to all of the young nonbinary's

happy nonbinary awareness week to all of the elderly nonbinary's

happy nonbinary awareness week to all of the confused nonbinary's

happy nonbinary awareness week to all of the therian nonbinary's

happy nonbinary awareness week to all of the androgynous nonbinary's

happy nonbinary awareness week to all of the not androgynous nonbinary's

happy nonbinary awareness week to all of the closeted nonbinary's

happy nonbinary awareness week to ALL of the nonbinary/queer/enby/genderqueer people

like, he’s so patient and detached from all of the stuff he’s gotten.

in the newest episode he destroyed 14566 blocks of bridge and blew up his original house just because he learned about xyz coordinates by accidentally pressing F5 and he wanted his house to be at the X:0 coordinate.

also look at this quarry. it’s his 5th quarry.

look at this absolute fucking massive hole.

and it’s not like “HELLOOOOO EVERYBODY WHAT IS UP, TODAY WE’RE GONNA BE PLAYING MIIIIIINECRAAAAFT” he’s just like. a quiet 30 year old japanese man who speaks very precisely and politely. and he even does his own english captions which are overlayed on the video and he uses emoticons like (0u0)/

some highlights:

-spends literal HOURS upon HOURS building these long, seemingly endless bridges because he wants to reach “the ends of the earth”

-around episode 40, he’s learned the ins and outs of redstone but doesn’t realize you can sleep in your bed.

-the noises he makes when he’s afraid of enemies/dies are precious and gentle and not at all what you’d expect from a famous horror artist

-spends hours trading resources with villagers to get glass only to find out almost 50 episodes in that you can make glass from sand

-destroys several mountains of sand in the desert to not only fuel his love for glass, but also because “explosions are sugoi 0u0″

-sees a silverfish and

-builds a giant “machine” that runs on redstone, minecarts, and pistons that pushes colored sand through a massive glass window. it doesn’t do anything, it just pushes all the blocks to the bottom and breaks after a few minutes. piro seems very pleased with it.

-makes these complex shapes/structures in an attempt to create a nether portal, doesn’t realize it’s just a rectangle

-a fan made a skin just for him, complete with 0u0 face

-falls in lava multiple times, never gives up

-builds a giant coin pusher game for funsies

-NANI KORE?

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For some inexplicable reason, not everyone understood that distinction. “I got people calling and complaining, like, ‘Are you going to kill her? Is she going to kill someone?’ ” says King. “I couldn’t believe that went somewhere in their minds that they thought that was what I was trying to say.”

(source)

on the one hand, i guess ads for cremation services must be a tricky thing to keep on theme without being too depressing/morbid/etc, so I can see how “just grab their attention with anything, doesn’t have to be related” would be an appealing advertising strategy.

VS an adult