Confessions of a Caffeinated Mind

Stuck.

But there’s a world of difference between doing what you love for you, and doing what you love for a paycheck. 

I went to undergrad for graphic design and 3-D design–art and more art, I usually say–and I loved it. You know what I didn’t love? Trying to collect my fees from clients. Trying to meet unrealistic, over-simplified or over-specific briefs from people who didn’t know what they were talking about. Coming home, having worked creatively all day, with no creative juice left for the things I wanted to do.

You know what I would tell you instead? Do something that you can be interested in, with people you like.

You don’t have to love it. Loving your work can be a lot, and it often means you have to live in your job 24/7. Some people can do that. Not everyone can, or should.  But if you can find work that’s interesting enough that it doesn’t feel tedious, and people you can enjoy spending your 9-5 with, and you can make money, that’s great! It means you can do the things you love for you.

I’m in law school now. It’s interesting work, and difficult, and I like doing it. I like how complicated it gets, and I like the stories it tells. But I don’t come home and read law journals for fun. I come home, and I sculpt, and I draw, and I paint, and I read. I do these things for me.

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“A fox’s teeth are very sharp.” (2013-2019) Silk filament on silk-hemp blend with hand-dyed silk chiffon scarf.  Text is Sandman: The Dream Hunters by @neil-gaiman, design inspired by illustrations of Yoshitaka Amano.  Dress by L.L.K.  Photo credit to Kenneth Williams.

Six years ago, my unbelievably talented wife decided to undertake a ridiculously long and complicated project: to embroider a story onto a dress.

We live in a very casual college town where no one ever dresses up for anything, so we began a tradition of throwing formal New Year’s Eve parties, and L being L, she made a dress every year. In 2013, she decided to take it a step further: she would create a dress inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: The Dream Hunters and then embroider the entire story onto the dress. The dress itself was the work of a few weeks and looked beautiful on her at the party, and then the real work began: planning, mapping, embroidering and embroidering and embroidering. She estimated it would take approximately ten years of doing needlework an hour or two each evening, leaving plenty of time to take nights or even months off. She finished in under six.

I can’t summon words to describe how proud of her I am right now. I mean, I am always proud of her, as she is an exceptionally kind and caring human being as well as a polymath (seamstress, carpenter, baker, programmer, naturalist, and tenured professor of biology), but she has created a true work of art and I hope it ends up in a museum somewhere to immortalize her talent, skill, and patience.

***I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America. by lauren hough

****An Epidemic of Disbelief by barbara bradley hagerty (about untested rape kits and police attitudes towards sexual assault) (sexual assault tw)

***How Do You Save Four Million Canadians From Hunger? by raizel robin

Neanderthals With Disabilities Survived Through Social Support by george dvorsky

I Lied When I Said We Did Everything We Could by lane wilson

Death in the Outback (australian aboriginal healthcare) by georgina kenyon

Stop this Madness: Schizophrenia in America by jonathon cohn

Vikings were never the pure-bred master race white supremacists like to portray by clare downham

How taming cows and horses sparked inequality across the ancient world by lizzie wade

Dear Therapist: I Don’t Talk to My Dad Anymore, but I’m Afraid to Tell My Family Why by lori gottlieb (sexual abuse tw)

***‘I Feel Pretty’ and the Rise of Beauty-Standard Denialism by amanda hess

How Arrival’s Designers Crafted a Mesmerizing Alien Alphabet by margaret rhodes

The Vertical Farm by ian frazier

***The Invisible City Beneath Paris by robert macfarlane

How Disney is Devouring Hollywood - And May Choke On It by adam b. vary

Judge Judy’s Lifetime Achievement Is Teaching Us to Laugh at the Less Fortunate by sarah jaffe

***The race to save a dying language (hawaiian sign language) by ross perlin

***What would cities look like if they were designed by mothers? by cristine murray

Please stop everything you’re doing and look at this baby peacock proudly showing his HUGE tail feathers.

INSTAGRAM  |  ETSY  |  FACEBOOK  |  DEVIANTART

Peacock Dragoness art doll

This doll designed and made by me fully from scratch. OOAK -  full reproduction of this design isn’t possible!

Sold.

The last mammoth died on in island off the northeast coast of Siberia in ~1650BCE.

But the second time it came past I saw 

That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal

That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about - unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit - with incredibly damaged chromosomes.

I teach genetics, I don’t deserve to have to explain why this is so wrong and yet. Oh my god. 

Mueller’s Ratchet–which is what this chucklefuck is talking about, the reason that purely asexual lineages don’t last well in evolutionary time–does not apply to feminism. The hypothetical scenario of merging two eggs to create a baby? Yeah, uh, that’s fucking sex in this context, whether or not it involves a male. 

There are zero feminists pushing for parthenogenesis for humans, mostly because the whole thing is basically impossible for mammals as a result of mammalian investment in genomic imprinting. Among other things. It’s the sort of thing that only works okay in species that don’t control their embryonic development anywhere near as closely as your basic placental mammal does, because it relies on a certain amount of flexibility about sex determination and placental mammals are kind of weird about that.

Even if there were, Mueller’s Ratchet only applies if you never ever sexually reproduce and reshuffle alleles, like the parthenogenetic whiptail lizards mentioned upthread. If we have the technology to induce parthenogenesis in a human woman, we have the technology to reshuffle some alleles now and again. Mueller’s Ratchet kind of presupposes that going in and manually editing a genome isn’t a fucking option, shitwad! 

Furthermore, Mueller’s Ratchet is specifically a population genetics phenomenon that refers to the accumulation of deleterious mutations within an asexually/clonally reproducing lineage. It has dick fuck all to do with chromosomes.

Mueller’s Ratchet exists in order to explain why asexually reproducing lineages haven’t overrun the world, because frankly in the short term these lineages usually do way better than their conspecific, obligate sexually reproducing partners do. Furthermore, it’s really fucking common to see species that reproduce sexually at some times and asexually at other times, depending on context and who’s available, and that’s in and of itself a complex fucking phenotype you species-centric cortically starved ignorant dillweed

all of this is completely fucking irrelevant to the mammoth example that @brett-caton there chose to bring up, by the way, because mammoths don’t fucking reproduce asexually either 

as you would know if you’d bothered to read the paper, you self-satisfied jellyfish fellator

or even the pop science article you cited yourself 

which clearly and cogently explains that the fucking mammoths died of being inbred as all shit, much like yourself

the laziness inherent in jumbling all this pig-ignorant, overconfident and understudied bullshit together and claiming it’s a solidly built house rather than a crumbling, confused pile of enraged starfish is the final straw

you can’t even be arsed to read an article that you dug up and cited yourself, you shithugger

how are feminists supposed to be the lazy ones?