Where Are My Jets

and then. My partner started it. And the SAME THING happened to him.

please do yourself a favor & watch this rock climbing–themed drag king/burlesque performance set to “roxanne” by the police with all the lyrics but “rox” edited out

GENUINELY before today i thought fluffernutter and american chop suey were part of National American Culture (TM). i was so puzzled by those questions that i googled both bc i was like "ohhh, this quiz maker thinks some american things aren't as widespread as they are..... they're assigning regional markers to things that aren't regional...... every american will instantly recognize these...."

and then i discovered both of these things are, in fact, particular to the new england region.

Character A: so the poison coverter is where we take something that typically would be food but has committed a food crime, so we run it through the poison coverter and it becomes poison. Think of it like an anti-nutrient.

Character B: anti-nutrient...oh like alcohol or drugs.

A: no no no no no, like if a carrot arrives with some ranch dressing, or like if a spinach arrives and there's some olive oil or if really anything has a seed oil at all, we turn it into poison.

because anyone with a very basic understanding of how molecules work can see that pairing one molecule with a different type of molecule does not fundamentally change either one of them. for example, if you eat a piece of bread, no matter if it's white bread or wheat bread, your body is going to break both of them down into glucose. there is absolutely no debate about this. it becomes glucose, because that is what any type of carbohydrate becomes when humans digest it. glucose is just glucose, no matter where it came from. because if you changed any single thing about a glucose molecule...it wouldn't be glucose anymore, it would be something else.

the difference between white bread and wheat bread, especially whole wheat bread, is the addition of fibre. what the fibre will do is attach to the glucose molecule and make the body absorb it slower, which can have a host of effects on a person's body. those different effects are morally neutral, meaning one is not better than another. and when eating fibre, how it changes the way glucose is absorbed into the body isn't even the most important part! the most important part is that it helps keep digestion working well, which is a crucial part of the human act of eating!

[a quick and friendly reminder that adequate amounts of glucose are absolutely necessary to sustain a human life. no one is "built different," this is just a fact of human biochem.]

to use the carrot/ranch dressing example, because it is a good one for showing that ALL macronutrients are necessary, there are important vitamins that your body needs every single day, and they're called fat-soluble vitamins. they cannot absorb into your body in the presence of water, or protein, or glucose, or whatever else. they require fat to be absorbed properly and in correct amounts. they are vitamin a, vitamin d, vitamin e, and vitamin k. most of them support immune function and bone health, though each of them have other roles, as well. you don't want too much of any, but it is vitally important to get enough, and you will not absorb enough of any of them without a certain amount of fat in your diet. no amount of wishing or hoping or believing the lies about fat will change this fact.

so, back to carrots and ranch, they're a good source of vitamin a. but if you just eat a bunch of carrots raw, you're not going to be able to readily absorb all of that vitamin goodness because it must be paired with a fat. so ranch dressing, instead of being "unhealthy," is actually a great way to make sure you're getting all of the vitamin a you need (unless you'd like to go blind or have a terrible immune system and fragile bones), because the fat in the dressing will help your body absorb the vitamin itself. and it has the benefit of tasting good to a lot of people.

diet culture is so anti-science it's not even funny. it presents itself as this medical and scientific authority, when it is neither and often tries to force us to do the opposite of what is best for our bodies.

all for the profit of billionaires. and we hate billionaires, don't we? you gonna do the opposite of what's best for you because some billionaire doesn't care if you live or die so long as you make them just that much richer?

the Sapiens have children with them, besides the point of view character, you might not see it easily but on page 2 a woman has a baby strapped to her back, and there's a couple on the final page. The Neanderthals have none. One of the theories I heard for their slow decline was the idea that perhaps their calorie requirements were much higher than a Sapiens', as they were stockier and had more muscle mass. Finding less food as the climate changes would make it harder for them to thrive, so I figured less children too. I wanted to hint at the slow decline

and yes several people pointed out that modern humans have their DNA, but as far as I see it it's just that Homo Sapiens has Neanderthal ancestry, but the actual species is gone. Same as if you had a dog with one recent wolf in its ancestry. it's still canis familiaris rather than canis lupus. and speaking of dogs... I included a wolf / early dog because there was a general overlap of the last neanderthals and the first domesticated dogs. I wanted to have another visual for the start and end of an era in there

VERY

fucking

did not

Albatross can go months, if not over a year without seeing land. There is a pocket of air trapped between wave fronts and they just ride ontop of it. To make that work, they need huge wings. If the winds die they rest on the surface, and wait for the winds to return; the huge wings mean it’s not worth it to fly any other way. When they need to eat they pluck fish and squid from the surface, and sometimes dive. Nobody is entirely sure if they sleep on the wing, and if so, how.

The large wings also mean that taking off and landing are the hardest parts of flying for an albatross. Generally they avoid it, but for nesting and resting, it’s unavoidable.