Travels with Stormcrow into the Internet

A soldier on the front lines had no time for formalities.

He grabbed a shard of broken pottery and wrote: "We are watching for the fire signals of Lachish... we cannot see Azekah." Azekah was gone. Jerusalem was about to fall.

These words, scratched in ancient Hebrew onto clay, are part of what archaeologists call the Lachish Letters.  Discovered in 1935 among the ruins of the biblical city of Lachish, the 21 inscribed shards date to the final weeks before Nebuchadnezzar's army destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE and exiled the Jewish people to Babylon.

What makes them extraordinary isn't their age.

It's their humanity. No kings, no priests - just real men, in real danger, watching the lights go out one by one.

And yet: the language they wrote in is still spoken today. The land they defended still carries their name. The people they belonged to came back.

Archaeology does not argue. It does not spin. It simply uncovers what was always there.

Twenty-six centuries of documented, unbroken connection between a people and their homeland - not claimed, not invented. Excavated.

𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗿𝗼𝗼𝘁𝘀 𝗴𝗼 𝗱𝗲𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀.

It's time for hissin'! This bunch is much less hissy than some previous fosters, but at least we get a half-hearted hiss from Cassandra before Zeus tells me where to go.

there is a link to actual factual information in the MANY comments calling this out: https://steady.page/en/naturematchcuts/posts/28951404-a41f-4215-ab89-bc35dbc41233

It may be AI, but it isn't misinformation.

And the person who wrote that article on Steady got A LOT WRONG. Like, a LOT, a lot.

First, let's address the suction claim, as that's the one I see most people pushing back on despite it being a documented scientific fact that's been the focus of several studies over the past couple of decades. This research article discusses it:

Response mechanisms of snails to the pulling force and its potential application in vacuum suction

"The flexible body increases work consumption by stretching and deformation during pulling, and a cavity with negative pressure differential can exist at the interface to help resist the pulling."

"Negative pressure differential" = suction. That's what suction is. The snail's slime is a critical part of maintaining this suction, which I think is very cool! It makes sense, too - have you ever tried to stick a dry suction cup to a dry window? Wetting the suction cup first helps it adhere.

This TechBriefs article talks about it as well and explains how it works in layman's terms: https://www.techbriefs.com/component/content/article/50807-snail-inspired-soft-suction-climbing-robots

"Snails can stably slide across a surface with only a single high-payload sucker, offering an efficient adhesive locomotion mechanism for next-generation climbing robots. The critical factor for snails’ sliding suction behavior is mucus secretion, which reduces friction and enhances suction."

So, we know snails DO use suction, in direct contradiction of what this person claims ("walking snails don’t produce a vacuum, they are no suction pads"). They did absolutely no research on this. I will additionally note that the snail's weight would be a safety issue in lifting larger species, but even in smaller ones, the suction force that holds the snail to its substrate is very strong for the snail. Trying to break its suction through upward tugging requires you to use an amount of force that risks harming the snail - its size and weight have nothing to do with this part. The force needed to break suction is proportionate to the snail. This means pulling is dangerous for giant African land snails and tiny little garden snails alike!

Now let's talk about injury. That one's a little more difficult, because even though there's a lot out there about snail injuries that's aimed at people with pet snails (this website's page on snail mantles offers a brief description of mantle tears and mantle collapse, with photos; this one goes a bit more in-depth), it is technically anecdotal. I haven't been able to find veterinary resources for snails yet. But it's true that the mantle is what connects the snail's body to its shell, and based on these sources, it is also true that the mantle can be torn, that it can collapse, and that mantle collapse can easily be fatal, so the infographic - although oversimplified - gets all of that right.

And as far as good sources go, this website offers a post from last summer discussing this very topic, and its authors went so far as to include an expert opinion:

Whether in forums or on social media, it’s often said that you should never pick up snails by their shells. The animals are so firmly attached to the ground that pulling on the shell can injure internal organs, as noted by the online gardening magazine “24Garten.de.” Unfortunately, there is little valid information to support this claim. PETBOOK therefore asked a snail expert whether you should indeed never pick up snails by their shells. Can You Pick Up Snails by Their Shells? The short answer: Only with caution. And never abruptly. Walter Wimmer, snail expert and head of the “Regional Nature Conservation” division at the Lower Saxony State Agency for Water Management, Coastal, and Nature Conservation, warns: “If you pull too hard on their shell, it can indeed cause injuries to the snail’s soft body due to overstretching of sensitive structures.” The reason: Snails adhere particularly firmly to the ground with their muscular foot through slime secretions. Simply pulling them up by the shell risks not only startling and stressing the animal but also causing real physical damage—especially to the so-called mantle, which connects the shell to the body. In the worst case, this can lead to death.

(emphasis added.)

The same website goes on to describe ways to pick up snails that are less risky - including the shell-tapping method (Wimmer cautions us to be careful to tap in a way that doesn't damage the shell). It's true that snails brush against things all the time, but passively bumping into something with only the weight of your tiny body is not the same physical sensation as a larger external force poking at you!

Finally, let's look at direction. Whether or not you set snails down in the direction they were heading won't matter. It's more important to place it somewhere dark and damp. But direction IS important for some larger animals that occasionally need to be relocated for safety, so I can understand offering that as advice simply as "best practice" for when you need to move something a short distance. And even though a snail has no plan for where it's going, it is leaving the place where it was for a reason - too dry, too bright, no food; a snail is a simple creature but these are survival factors it can evaluate - so I do think moving the snail away from where it's leaving is still a good idea.

At the end of the day, a snail is a soft and delicate animal attached quite firmly to its hard shell above and the hard ground beneath, and lifting the shell as though it were a handle attached to the snail, rather than part of the snail's sensitive body, simply is not safe. Guiding the snail onto a leaf or twig is safest if you have time, but tapping on the shell is a good way to encourage the snail to break suction so you can lift the animal safely.

My coworkers: man, youre a real red-card commie, aren’t you? You gonna start telling us to vote NDP and that healtcare isnt a scam too? Jesus christ go give someone else your goddamn revolution pamphlets, lenin.

Me on tumblr: while i appreciate the animosity towards billionaires, i dont think literally dragging a guillotine into the streets and beheading people as a public spectacle is going to actually solve the problems inherent in the system considering the french already tried that and it didnt work out well for them. Also i dont think anybody has the right to decide who lives and who dies, im pretty anti death penalt-

Note: not civil rights. HUMAN RIGHTS. As in "if you're not indigenous, you have no right to be alive."

Further note: my pinned explicitly notes that not being indigenous doesn't mean Palestinians shouldn't have the right to dignity and safety.

The specific call for destroying-Israel-and-America is a huge red flag for propaganda from the dictatorship of Iran. Like, I promise you there are not two (2) lone deeply evil countries on earth that should be nuked from orbit.

But there's definitely one (1) deeply evil dictatorship on earth that specifically and routinely calls for that.

There are many (many) countries on earth with extremely complicated histories full of ethnic cleansing, slavery, and genocide.

(Many of them way more recent than the U.S.'s practices of ethnic cleansing, slavery, and genocide. Myanmar just ethnically cleansed the Rohingya Muslims a few years ago, and nobody would suggest we should wipe Myanmar off the planet.)

Sometime in late 2023, I was beefing my way through some instagram comments, and a nonbinary Ethnic Studies professor genuinely told me that someday, trans women of color would do to the U.S. what Hamas had done to Israel.

I honestly don't know what leads someone to go, "aha! this is the one specific demographic that actually deserves to be here, and to torture, mutilate, and burn its way across the country in order to claim it." (And the demographic isn't even "people indigenous to this land.")

I do assume this person was unaware of exactly how fucking brutal Hamas's attack was.

But the idea that trans women of color, as a group, are like, "Wow, I really wish we could slaughter and conquer America, including cis indigenous people, transmascs, an unknown number of enbies, cis people with disabilities, cis Black people, white trans women," and so on, is just fucking mind-blowing to me.

Like, I absolutely understand that we all feel this level of rage at our oppressors sometimes. But most of us recognize that it only works as an angry fantasy, and in real life would be like trying to rebuild from an apocalypse.

I don't even think this person counted themself among trans women of color. I think they were just making a really impassioned statement without thinking any of it through.

I also don't remember who it was that said, somewhere in the weeds of tumblr discourse, that we should destroy Japan too. They wanted to destroy Israel because they thought it was an ethnostate. The response was that there are many countries whose populations are basically one ethnic group, like Japan (which is not what an ethnostate is, but it's what most people seem to THINK it is); and they immediately and enthusiastically included Japan on the list, to the absolute bafflement of everyone else.

I think there are a lot of people who are very scared and angry, and don't really care about anybody or anything; they just want to lash out and imagine their problems could be solved through violence.