nothing, and then suddenly everything

Yes, everything about me is fucked up, but what if that was secretly awesome?

My meme-ish poster about executive dysfunction, or "The Sits" as we call it in our house. This is to share my experiences with exec. dysfunction, everyone's a little different ☺️

Are... are your organs covered in blood??? Since blood tends to flow thru the blood vessels, and if your body is healthy and all your blood vessels are imtact then your organs shouldn't be covered in blood, right? But just saying that feels wrong.

🎨 RzgandAults on x

King Ozymandias

rendered in stone with a

strident decree.

Says our dear traveller

(unsentimentally)

"All that remains is his

materialist-scumbag

THE TICK THAT DREW THE MAP OF THE WEST June 28, 2026

So the longhorn was a garbage animal. Stringy, mean, half-feral, descended from Spanish cattle that had gone loose in the brush country for a couple centuries and bred for survival rather than meat. In Texas after the war it was worth maybe three or four dollars a head, because there were millions of them and nobody to eat them. The local market was Texans, and Texas was broke. Up in Chicago or New York the same animal was worth thirty, forty dollars, because the Union had spent four years eating its way through the eastern cattle supply and the cities were short on beef.

That spread is the whole engine of the cattle drive. You don't need a tick to explain why a man would walk a cow a thousand miles to multiply its value by ten. The arithmetic does it.

What the tick explains is the SHAPE.

Because the thing about the longhorn nobody in the romance mentions is that it was a carrier. Centuries in the brush had given it a shaky immune truce with Babesia bigemina, a protozoan that lived in its blood and rode around on a tick that dropped off into the grass wherever the herd went.

The longhorn itself looked fine. Walked fine, sold fine, butchered fine. But the cattle it walked past, the fat improved Midwestern stock that had never met the parasite, those animals would start pissing blood and die at a rate that touched nine in ten. The Texans, reasonably, refused to believe their healthy-looking cattle were doing it. They took it to the Supreme Court in 1877 and won, on the entirely correct observation that their cows weren't sick. The cows weren't sick. The cows were Typhoid Mary.

(The disease disappeared every winter, too, north of a certain latitude, which baffled everybody for thirty years until somebody worked out that the tick just froze to death up there, no vector, no disease, the whole thing seasonal in a way that made it look like a moral judgment on Texas cattle specifically. It wasn't anybody's leading hypothesis that an insect was committing the murders. The leading hypothesis for a while was that the longhorns were poisoning the grass.)

So now run the two facts together. The cow is worth ten times more up north. The cow kills every other cow it passes on the way up north. What do you get?

You get a line.

You get a bunch of lines, actually. Quarantine lines, drawn and redrawn by Missouri and Kansas legislatures and eventually by the federal government, declaring that Texas cattle could not cross at all, or could only cross in winter when the tick was dead, or could only cross by rail if they were going straight to slaughter and never touched dirt that a local cow might later stand on. Missouri shut its border. Farmers formed Vigilance Committees (which is a polite nineteenth-century way of saying armed men) and turned the herds back at gunpoint. Kansas banned Texas cattle outright in 1885. And every one of those legal and shotgun-enforced lines was a wall the drive had to find a gate in.

The gate was the railhead.

This is the part that rewires the map. The famous cattle town (Abilene, Dodge City, Wichita, Ellsworth, the whole gunfighter pantheon) is not a town that grew up around ranching or water or gold or a river crossing. It's a point where the trail coming up out of the quarantine zone touched a railroad that could take the cow east to the slaughterhouse without it walking through anybody's protected pasture.

Abilene gets invented basically from scratch in 1867 by a man named Joseph McCoy who looked at the map, found a spot on the Kansas Pacific that was far enough WEST that the trail in from Texas could swing around the settled farm country and its quarantine, and built stockyards there. The town is a loading dock. The cowboy at the end of the trail, in the saloon, shooting the place up: he is a longshoreman who has just finished a shift, and the shift was getting the cargo to the one point where it could legally change from hooves to wheels.

And the cargo had to keep moving west precisely because the tick kept the settled east closed. As Kansas farmers spread and the quarantine line marched west with them, the railhead had to march west too. Abilene to Ellsworth to Wichita to Dodge, each town flaring up and dying back as the line of legal infection-free transfer slid across the state. The towns weren't competing on amenities. They were competing on being the current solvent point in a chemistry problem about where a tick could and couldn't survive the trip.

(Dodge City lasts longest because it's furthest out, last to get caught by the advancing farms, sitting out where the quarantine couldn't reach it yet. Its whole mythological career (Wyatt Earp, Boot Hill, the Long Branch) is a few years long and happens because of an agricultural-settlement frontier creeping toward it at the speed of homesteading. When the farms arrive, the party's over. The party was always a function of the farms not having arrived.)

So the geography of the Wild West, which towns exist and why they're where they are and why they boom for five years and empty out and why the trail bends where it bends, is not topography and not destiny and not the romance of open range.

It's the intersection of a price differential and a quarantine map. The price differential said go north. The quarantine map, drawn by the tick, said you may only go north HERE, and HERE, and now not there anymore, here. The cow drew the route and the parasite drew the borders and the men with the guns were just enforcing a public-health regime they didn't know was a public-health regime.

And it all gets zeroed out, eventually, the same way these things always do, not by a hero but by a logistics upgrade. They build the Kansas City stockyards and the packing plants, and then the rail net gets dense enough that the cow doesn't have to walk to the train at all, the train comes to the cow. Refrigerated cars mean you slaughter in Chicago and ship the meat instead of the animal. The long drive, the trail town, the whole apparatus that existed only to get a tick-bearing animal across a quarantine line to a loading point, it just stops being necessary, and the gunfighter towns settle down into being ordinary Kansas, dry and flat and law-abiding, within about a decade of their own legend.

The cattle tick itself they finally beat in 1943, dipping every cow in the South in arsenic for forty years to break the lifecycle. Nobody made a movie about the dipping vats.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

most big herbivores are, frankly. if you have a pretty steady supply of food and don’t have to worry about missing a hunt and starving to death, you can afford to throw your weight around more and generally be more aggressive!

that’s why the most dangerous big animals in the world are almost all herbivores.

This is Camarasaurus lentus, around 15 ish meters and over 16 tonnes, for reference sake, the largest african elephant bull EVER recorded was 11 tonnes. pretty decent difference right?  Well, except one thing. This is a SMALL sauropod. Want to see a large one?

Yeah, you’re reading that right, 53 tonnes. Almost five times heavier than the largest recorded african elephant ever. And they get even larger.

This bastard was last estimated at 73 tonnes, the largest animal ever to walk the earth. And they didn’t just get big, they got l o n g, too

That right there, is BYU 9024, it (among with a few undescribed remains) shows an animal in the size range of 40+ meters, this one here clocks in at around 40, and the funny thing is? this is the *conservative* estimate, larger specimens are not unreasonable in the slightest. It’s not quite as heavy as the big south american bastard above it, but at 67 tonnes, its close.

Secondly, speed. We’ve all seen it, lumbering behemoths that were dumb as rocks and probably about as fast, with a tailwind, going downhill. Well…. Not really, the latest studies done as of Asier larramedi’s sauropod facts and figures book gives some… Horrifying estimates.

I’ll spare you the complete explanations, there will be a paper out soon that goes into greater depth, but I’d like to draw your attention to the speeds, specifically fo the animal called Giraffatitan. Most people are familiar with it in some way, shape or form, but to clear up what exactly Giraffatitan is. 

They’re not the small ones in the foreground, they’re the big ones in the back. 33 tonnes of pure muscle, moving at 25 kp/h. Again, to provide further reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUE304bqwQc  THIS is how fast that is. It’s a house running at you, forget a hippo charging you, this would be a tidal wave of flesh and hatred bearing down on you.

And finally, weapons.

Like someone earlier pointed out,  Apatosaurus should have absolutely trounced the indominus, because quite frankly at such a size anything you do will hurt. Kicks with the front or hind limbs will be utterly devastating to anything except another of their kind, but Apatosaurus had another thing going in its favour.

One thicc-ass neck. Pictured here with speculative keratin spikes on the bottom, whilst the spikes are speculation, the neck itself would have essentially functioned like a fleshy battering ram, capable of pulping ribcages and smashing anything that could have “preyed” upon them. But that’s not even the most terrifying thing, though this is not specific to Apatosaurus itself, but to all diplodocoids (Apatosaurus, Barosaurus, Diplodocus, etc.) Specifically, the tail. 

This is Diplodocus, as you can see, this animal is half tail, as you might also be able to see, the latter half of that tail tapers down to what can, in all essence be described as- a whip. A serrated whip, powered by some of the largest muscles in the largest animals that would have walked on earth. But it gets even MORE horrifying.

You see, there have been studies that have come to a conclusion, and though there are those that have doubted them, I personally have looked at the papers and found merit to the theories.

Well, I’ll not hold you in suspense any longer.

The tips of these tails, could have, and would have broken the sound barrier. Yup, you heard that right, and as soon as that fact begins to seep in, you’ll realize the horrifying implications. A diplodocoid whipping its tail, would blow out the eardrums of any animal close by and unfortunate enough to draw its ire, the sauropod itself would possibly not come out unscathed, but when you can literally give a would-be predator internal hemmorages by, what to them would be essentially like snapping a finger, the benefits begin to outweigh the risks involved. And that’s not even mentioning what would happen if it HIT anything, an impact at such velocity, with such mass driving it would be- quite frankly? Devastating beyond words. Flesh wouldn’t just tear, it wouldn’t just break skin or bones, flesh would MELT, bones would shatter, if not simply cease to be. And this is on a sufficiently sized animal such as Allosaurus or Torvosaurus. On a human? They would be ripped in half. So yeah, Sauropods get shafted in popular media to an extent that isn’t even possible, if you think hippo’s are scary, imagine something fourty times its size, faster than you, and able to kill you without even touching you. Sauropod are kaiju, plain and simple.

The babies were really cute though. This is andrew, and he’s a baby… the size of a horse. If you want to know just how tiny they began, this is probably a good reference.

you might not be a threat to an adult sauropod, but they may very well still decide to smear you and any other small maybe-predator in the area just in case you might get any ideas about snacking on their eggs or babies now or in the future.

but, to your point, the cat didn't 'somehow' get on the jury duty list, it was on the jury duty list very specifically because the cat was registered to vote. the unspoken assumption is that it's so easy to register to vote that even a cat can do it! the cat is even jokingly accused of voter fraud. of which, of course, the cat is innocent.

it is left to the reader's imagination how that happened, and who else could potentially register to vote.

this post is not in any way intending to blame anybody who read that and thought 'huh, what a funny story' and thought nothing more about it. this post is intending to demonstrate the ideology underlying the story going around, that one might have missed on a first reading.

i admit, i also uncritically reblogged that story, in no small part because i knew a cat had in fact been summoned for jury duty before! the voter registration stuff pinged as odd, but the humor of the situation overrode my inner critic. in the original, real story, the cat had been listed as a pet in the census, which is how he somehow ended up on the jury roll. the other details - right on down to the first exemptions being denied and a vet being asked to write testimony that the potential juror was in fact, a cat - were lifted directly from this sixteen-year-old news story.

He goes down, ends up in a coma or brain dead, on life support, genuinely never coming back and even if part of him did he would be in agony from his cpr injuries. The best thing is to let him go.

But its not convenient to. His own *wife* runs away to China so they can't *make* her do the right thing and allow him to pass. She doesn't love him enough to override the political posturing. His own family is letting his abused half alive carcass get played with like a political doll while he's trapped in purgatory, as close to undead as one can be.

I knew a rapist who was an absolute ride-or-die friend to his gamer bros. Like, give the last dollar from his pocket to a friend who got a flat tire, and then turn around and go rape a Freshman that evening.

I knew a vicious child abuser who wept like a baby when her dog died.

The nastiest human being on the planet nevertheless feels obscurely melancholy sometimes, or has high spirits when they step out doors on the first warm day of spring, or has opinions on their favorite TV show and which side the toilet paper should hang on and whether or not the room should be cold or warm when you go to sleep.

We're all still just people. Complex, with fully-realized interior worlds.

None of that will save you from becoming a monster, if you decide to do monstrous things.